


Hang Fire

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alien Character(s), Alien Planet, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Space, Colonization, F/M, M/M, Multi, Spaceships and the use thereof, space western
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-09-22
Packaged: 2018-07-15 15:33:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 27,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7228351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1. a common failure in firearms.</p>
<p>2. a delay in progression or action.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Outriders

The grass was deep purple, the rocks an old-bruise yellow, the sunset atmo an undecided country between pink and aqua. The planet didn’t lack for beauty, even where it was stingy with the necessities, and Steve tried to capture it with his tablet and pen while it moved and breathed, the whole vignette of it standing still just long enough for longing.

It was pretty, no doubt about it.

But, to Steve, the planet had the same quality of every other location they’d hopscotched in their searching: a pivot point, a waystation, a jumble of images forgotten as soon as it passed the window. And like all places that weren’t home, Bucky would never be there.

He stopped sketching. Ten minutes away from the first real irrigation the area had probably seen in decades, it occurred to Steve to wonder what color the crops would be. On the tablet, in the space between where’d he’d drawn Sam at work and where more distant shapes were still unfinished, he’d sketched a man from memory; With a sniper’s rifle held across his shoulders, arms loosely draped, head tilted back to look at the sky.

The gun was a little much, but Steve couldn’t imagine him with a hoe or a shovel.

Looking at his very real, barefoot alien buddy, perched on a sunny outcrop with his bow slung over one violet-scaled shoulder, Steve wasn’t sure what kind of food Themarun’s natives pulled from the yellow soil in the first place. It was enough to know it’d grow, maybe, and they’d be on their way. Not home, no, but a little goodwill was a useful provision for the journey.

“Alright, take it up,” he said to Sam, who directed the Redwing drone across the old wheelines they’d modified. As the drone flew quietly over the field, its delicate laser scanned the entire length of all six crawlers, and the yellow dirt beneath them, before cutting a sharp line down to the grass-choked river where Nat stood by with her own modification.

“System looks good,” said Sam.

“What do you think, Clint?” Natasha called from the river bank. “Pretty slick.”

Clint ignored her, turning his narrowed black eyes to Steve.

“Please tell her to stop calling me that.”

“We haven’t exactly bumped into a lot of people on our mission. She’s just. . .enjoying the novelty.”

“It would take some serious surgery on a human throat to be able to say his real name,” Natasha interjected over the comm. She put her hands on her hips, just above her gunbelt, and shouted across at Clint, “We’re about to give you rain. A nickname is a fair trade.”

Clint sighed expansively, or maybe it was a hiss.

“If this works you can call me whatever you want.” His voice gave the gravelly terrain a run for its money. He crouched and shot Steve an earnest look, his voice conspiratorial. “Your team was quiet about the details of what you’re doing on this end of the galaxy. Even as much as she likes me, Natasha wouldn’t say.”

“You think she likes you, huh?” He smirked up at Clint, but the alien sat patient as a statue overlooking a city. Steve eased up off his seat on their crate of new supplies and said, “It’s not that complicated. People have been settling on other planets since they first figured out how to leave their own. That’s our mission, same as most travelers you’ve probably met.”

“Most travelers don’t put seven sols of work into a place just to turn around and leave.” Clint nodded his pale, crested head. “You might stay here. Give your engines a chance to cool.”

“We get this set up and we’ll be going, just like we promised.”

“Yeah, I get that.” Clint’s nod turned into shake. “But I don’t really get it.”

They’d seen Themarun’s cities from orbit. Some could have been just townships, a dozen or so deep jewels set in the canyons and along the waterfronts, all with bright lights at their center. Steve had argued to move on without ever touching down. For him, the planet had its people already, and it was scratched off the list before their first orbital scan. But they’d needed supplies, and he’d been overruled.

“This little crew? We’re just the scouts. Somewhere behind us there’s a whole fleet full of people looking for a home. And I’m not saying we don’t need it badly,” he said, rubbing absently where his rolled shirtsleeve exposed his wrist. “But I’m not looking to take it from someone else.”

“Hmm,” Clint replied. He gave the hearing tech curving over his strange, flat ears a solemn stroke. “Maybe you don’t have the translation right. There’s a world of difference between an offer and an invasion.”

“Only at first.”

Steve didn’t look at him, but instead whipped his hat off, waved it across the ochre boulders at Natasha, and red hair flashed back at him as she did the same. She activated the device spanning the river, sending a meaty hum rolling through the valley, arcing from the river to the canyon wall, right across the hopeful little field of who-knew-what crops.

Steve nodded to Sam. “Let’s make it rain.”

“Oh, come on!” Sam tipped his head back and spread his arms. “You knew I’d been waiting to say that all week.”

As he always did when Sam was right, when Sam smiled brightly in his rightness, Steve looked at the ground. “I sure did,” he said.

“Okay, here goes nothing.” Sam pursed his mouth and tapped out a sequence on the dusty irrigation control panel. “Owe me a snappy line, Rogers.”

A soft, shushing sigh replaced the hum pervading the valley, and the modified machinery lifted off the field with its slow-turning wheels horizontal to the ground.

“We do get storms, you know.” Clint squinted at the petal pink sky, his reptilian toes clenched in the dirt.

“Yeah?” said Steve. “And it’s enough?”

“I don’t know, I’m not a farmer.” Clint’s chest puffed out a fraction inside his black vest. “More of a-”

Off to Steve’s left, water from the surface of the river began to ripple and shimmy. It evaporated with stunning speed, disappearing into Nat’s hard-light portal webbing. Heartbeats later it reappeared from the webbing set inside the wheels on the line. As the hovering wheelines swayed, rain cascaded in a gentle patter over the furrows.

Sam pumped his fists into the air. “YES! Hoo yah!”

With the angle of the sun, a rainbow began to shimmer across the dampening yellow soil. Months of no contact, and no prospects. A week on planet he’d decided wasn’t an option before his boots hit the surface. The fragile little rainbow was the most beautiful thing Steve could have asked for as a parting gift, and he reminded himself to add it to his sketch later.

From down by the river, Natasha whooped and threw her hat in the air. She jogged up the bank, vaulting onto the outcrop where Clint stood assessing his new irrigation system. Steve thought his lack of eyebrows made the man look doubtful. Or overwhelmed.

“You’re officially a farmer now, Clint.” Natasha knuckle-tapped his shoulder.

“I’m. . .Yeah, I’m that alright.” Clint turned to Steve with concern in his black eyes, or so it looked like, a dozen more reasons for Steve to water his own roots right here piling up almost visibly between them. “The offer stands, you know.”

“Cap’s not really a guy who changes his mind,” Sam said with a grunt, hefting his pack.

Nat hopped down from the boulder and stuck her landing silently. “Which is why he never reported finding this planet.” Her eyes swept the damp field, ending at Steve’s face. “Isn’t that right?”

Helpfully, the comm channel twittered before the issue could be pushed.

“ _News from the fleet. We have to jump. Time to go, heroes_.”

“On our way, _solntse_ ,” Natasha replied, eying Steve.

Giving the landscape and the rainbow one final glance, he gripped Clint’s hand, which was surprisingly warm, and said, “Take care of yourself.”

“Probably not.” He quirked his odd-lipped smile and unslung his bow. “That’s what this is for.”

Drawing on its laser-like string, Clint nocked and aimed at the first moving target he saw. Steve grinned.

“Hey, hey! Don’t even think about it,” Sam said darkly. He recalled Redwing out from under Clint’s threatening arrow and tucked it gingerly in his pack.

Dry as dirt, Clint shrugged and said, “Sorry. Habit.”

“I know the feeling,” said Steve. He gripped the handle of the large crate and swung all four hundred pounds of it, one-handed, into the bed of the Rambler. “Come on, let’s get this show back on the road.”

Nat and Sam mounted the Rambler after him, waving at Clint as he became small and indistinct behind a veil of their dust. Steve pointed the vehicle’s thick tires toward the center of a silvery mirage, where their shuttle waited.


	2. Knock Round

The _Daybreak_ had the nobility of ‘exploration’ built right into its hull, the very metal of her bulkhead shined to that single purpose, a key looking for its lock.  But on more nights than Steve wanted to count, he ducked right under the high bar humanity had set for him, and spent precious energy traveling backwards in time.  
  
One jump away from Themarun Steve left his bunk to engage in something he shouldn’t have been doing at such a late hour.  Shouldn’t have been doing at all, maybe, not fifteen years on; A million-to-one recovery mission he’d assigned himself out of stubborn guilt, the kind of lost cause his crew would call him on if they knew. . .and then help him with, if he let them.  But it wasn’t their fight, hadn’t ever been, so working on it while they slept was tactical.   
  
He sat in the quiet bridge, at the helm, where everything but the console and his tablet was as dark as the territory they sailed through.    
  
“Vis, show me that last quadrant again.”  
  
A series of starmaps hung in the air above the console, big as the forward observation window behind them.  Areas of interest flashed brighter as they were highlighted.  
  
“Sector eighteen of Gamma, KBR86 through KBR90,” said ViSN, softly.  Steve nodded.  The AI had learned to lower his voice, just for Steve’s clandestine habits.  
  
The starmaps lingered, showing him whole systems of stars and planetoids and clusters of debris and yet telling him nothing he wanted to hear.  Steve reached for his coffee cup.   
  
“No relevant findings.  No signatures,” ViSN stated. “As before.”  
  
Steve peered into his mug.  
  
“Yeah.  I thought maybe. . .”  
  
But the map was as empty as his cup.  He put it down and pulled his tablet onto his lap.  
  
“Signal buoys in the Gamma quadrant have been silent for ten cycles,” offered ViSN.  
  
Without looking up, Steve said, “So let’s fine-tooth the old data.”  
  
“There will be nothing new to find in these maps until the buoys are synced again.”   
  
“Alright, thanks. Let’s jog forward to where we were.” Focused on his tablet, Steve barely registered the shifting maps above him as they blurred brightly in his periphery.  He thumbed through old files of his obsessive sketching dating back ten, twelve, fifteen years.  A backward record, the recent doodles of plants and animals gave way to portraits of people, old, then young, and finally to a kid’s crude renderings of Kings Station in orbit.  The first home he knew.  
  
“What will you do with yourself if you ever find him?”  
  
Steve swiveled the pilot’s seat to see a dark head poking through the doorway.  The one person he couldn’t hide from.  It wasn’t her fault, though, it was her gift.  
  
“You will be too exhausted to enjoy it,” Wanda said, cradling a mug of tea. “Or you’ll die of shock.  Men of your age should be careful not to startle.”  
  
“Jokes. Nice. That’s two for you today.” Steve swiveled back and waved at the starmap. “This is just. . .it helps me sleep.”  
  
“No it doesn’t.” She drank her tea.  
  
He sighed, chucked the tablet onto the console, and rubbed his face.  When he opened his eyes again she was curling up in the navigator’s seat beside him.  
  
“I’ve got the time, doesn’t hurt to use it,” he said.  Wanda made a face and handed him her mug.  
  
While he sipped her smoky, bitter blend, Wanda said, “His highness reports that the delay will only be a few cycles.  Solar storms are making light jumps tricky.”  
  
Steve nodded.  She reached over to squeeze his arm.  
  
“We’re closing the distance. They’ll be with us again soon.”  
  
Steve let Wanda retrieve her tea from him, and she settled back to examine the map he’d pulled.  If she had an opinion about his side project, about what she saw in his brain, she kept quiet about it. Always had.  He was about to ask, as he nearly had a handful of times, if the others knew what he did at night.  Picking up his tablet as a distraction was a safer bet.  
  
Wanda sat up on her knees and enlarged the starmap with the tips of her fingers. “Vis, what am I looking at?”  
  
“Delta quadrant.”  
  
As she stared into the heart of the starmap, pulling at the dark spaces to see what might be hidden, Steve said, “You’re right, you know.  I have no idea what I’ll do if I ever find him.”   
  
She looked sidelong at him with a shadowy smile.  
  
“I could tell you.”  
  
“Thanks, I’m good.”   
  
“All this,” said Wanda, waving at the starmap, “it’s something I think my brother would do if it was me out there, and he wouldn’t be afraid of the consequences.”  
  
“That’s my problem, huh?  Consequences.”  
  
Wanda sipped her tea, and let her meaning cling to the silence.   _Fear_.    
  
But if hers was a weapon, carefully dismantled and stowed, Steve’s had always been more like fuel.  And he was too far gone to change course.  
  
His bleary eyes rested on her jacket: a pre-war relic worn by at least a dozen men much bigger than her, patched with mismatched symbols that predated anyone still living.  Flags, mostly.  Ones that divided, and some that joined.  One of the oldest, the hammer and sickle, sat on her shoulder.  In the end, none of the flags he’d been taught to study had survived to decorate the future, or to claim it.  
  
“Way back before me, if you can even imagine that far back, they called it the ‘space race,’” he said, shuttling through sketches from the time of his enlistment.  “Russians and Americans trying to beat each other to the moon in nothing but tin cans strapped to bombs.”  
  
Wanda snorted and put down her mug.  
  
“Sounds dangerous, it must have been worth it.”    
  
Steve stopped scrolling.  It wasn’t a sketch that made him pause, but the rare instance that he’d remembered to take a photo.  In it, a compact, dark-haired soldier stood at a large viewport.  His back, with a pulse rifle slung crosswise, was framed by a hazy planet, and the stretching expanse of a space station all around. Steve looked up to find Wanda’s big, calculating eyes on him, waiting.  
  
“What was on the moon?”  
  
He handed her the tablet so she could see, even if she couldn’t understand.

“A really great view.”


	3. Heave in Sight

In his dream, Steve wasn’t doing anything at all. He laid in a mangy field of scrub and warm dirt, watching tufts of purple grass dip their blades in a tender breeze.  And then an alarm rang out, colliding with the mountain on one side to bounce back, washing over him until the sound doubled on itself. He couldn’t tell from where it’d issued, only that it grew louder. And then the grass hissed, bending lower under a hard wind.  One that smelled like rain.  
  
“ _Proximity alert.  All hands. Proximity Alert. All Hands._ ”   
  
Steve bolted to his feet, swaying as his blanket puddled around his ankles.   
  
“Vis?”  He grabbed the railing above his bunk and rubbed his eyes.   
  
“Come to the bridge, Captain.”   
  
He managed pants and socks, and when he ducked through the bridge portal half a minute later he saw that Sam was similarly shirtless.  His back was bent over the console, head swiveling from the forward window to the lit-up console.   
  
“Some kind of cloud,” Sam said, without looking up.  Steve joined him, squinting out into the black.     
  
There was indeed a cloud. . .of something.  A greenish fog of debris, different sizes rotating lazily in all different directions like a mobile over a crib, with a mass of something denser and more opaque at its center.   
  
Steve reached under the console and handed Sam the blanket they kept there, then he opened up a terminal. “It’s not on our charts?”   
  
“Not within my database,” replied ViSN.   
  
“It’s huge.”   
  
Steve glanced over his shoulder at Natasha coming through the door, fully dressed.   
  
“Go around it,” said Wanda, stepping from behind her.   
  
“Get T’Challa on the line,” Sam replied, waving Wanda toward the comm.   
  
“Can’t yet.  The link is static.”   
  
Steve swiveled the pilot’s seat, dropped into it, and snapped off the auto-pilot.  He swung the _Daybreak_ in a slow arc around the cloud and flipped on the exterior floodlight.   
  
Natasha hugged her arms, leaning forward. “What is that?”   
  
As the ship came around the opposite side of the cloud, the floodlight penetrated a gap in the debris.  A somewhat familiar shape emerged: oblong, about the size of a small transport, a flare of wings on either side.   
  
“Could be a shuttle or escape pod,” said Sam, pulling the blanket around his shoulders.   
  
Wanda murmured, “Q-class vessel.”   
  
“There’s a Q-class?”  Sam looked sideways at her.   
  
Natasha bumped Steve’s shoulder. “Yeah, but it takes forever to get in.”   
  
Steve hardly felt her nudging him.  Like most places that were more dark than light, space had plenty of ghosts, and any crew with their years knew they’d be flying among the haunted.  So he steered the ship with a believer’s unsteady arms, like it was all ten thousand tons in his hands with no assist.     
  
“Q-class denotes spacecraft of specification and origin unknown to standard Station Accord, WSC, or-”   
  
“Thank you, Vis, we were getting there,” Wanda said, moving to Steve’s other side for a better look at the roadkill they’d almost run over.  “Is it occupied?”   
  
Steve swallowed dryly, pushing the ship in closer.  “That’s the sixty-four-thousand dollar question.”   
  
Nat accessed the terminal next to him, muttering lightly,  “Four hundred years of human media history and you’re obsessed with game shows.”   
  
ViSN went silent for several long minutes, a century for a program so advanced.     
  
“Yes. The spacecraft is occupied.”   
  
Steve exhaled and said, “Can you be more specific?”   
  
“Occupant is alive.”   
  
One less ghost, at least.  Steve eased the _Daybreak_ to a stop, squinting into the path cut by the floodlight.   
  
“Anything else?”  Wanda crossed her arms.   
  
“About the occupant? Unknown. But the material present has an indeterminate age of anywhere from fifteen to one million years.”   
  
“Helpful.” Sam sat down on his end of the console, swiveling his chair distractedly. “What the hell is it doing way out here?”   
  
“Analysis of the particulate cloud indicates the presence of manufactured metaloid compounds, inorganic matter, and organic matter including distinct DNA markers.  Checking records.”  ViSN instantly provided charts and files of the data.  Natasha tracked through it all on the terminal with a few quick gestures.   
  
“This was a _ship_ ?” She turned to Steve. “How did we miss this?”   
  
He should’ve been cold, sitting there in nothing but pajama pants and some old socks.  The ship got chilly at night to conserve power, but cold was the last thing creeping up on him, making him shake.  He stood up. “DNA floating in space. Everything vaporized. What can do that?"   
  
“That thing could be the reason for the wreckage in the first place,” said Sam.  “Maybe we should consider shooting it.”     
  
Steve rounded on him. “With what? The soil analyzer?”   
  
“The origin of the pod and its former vessel might be ascertained sooner than we thought,” offered ViSN.   
  
Steve stood in the center of a semi-circle of expectant faces, all of them unused to cliffhangers.   
  
“I told y’all not to teach him dramatic language,” said Sam.   
  
Wanda raised her voice, impatient. “What is it, Vis?”   
  
“Scans indicate that the spacecraft is plated with vibranium.”     
  
Steve blinked around the instant stinging in his eyes, squeezed down on the thin, prickly pain that telegraphed an optimism he’d honestly, momentarily, forgotten about.   
  
“ _What?_ ”  Sam looked not at the forward window but at Steve as ViSN continued.   
  
“There is a ninety-nine percent probability that the destroyed ship that once contained it was part of our original fleet.”   
  
A fleet that could have died right there at Trippak, if not for one ship.  Steve could still see the fighter in his mind, disappearing behind a plume of FTL particles, hounded by a warship ten times its size.  And then nothing, both gone in a heartbeat. Emptiness where a soul had been, buying fifteen years of peace for everyone but Steve himself.   
  
“Which _ship?_ ”  His throat seized around the word.   
  
“Signatures are consistent with the SAS _Havok_ ,” ViSN replied, “and with its last known pilot, James Buchanan Barnes.”   
  
Steve’s mind blanked.  End transmission.  Dark screen without so much as a blinking cursor.     
  
No, that wasn’t it.  His mission became achievable, hard and bright-edged, and everything else lost shape or form. No planets had the value of this particular pile of space trash, no fleet was worth as much.  It was an unfair truth; The first and oldest he knew.     
  
He reached across the helm to engage the holding thrusters. “Vis, prep the arm.  Sam, Natasha. Secure everything in the cargo bay and suit-up.”   
  
“Steve. . .”   
  
“Rogers, wait.”   
  
“He’s alive, Nat.  I’m getting him back.”  Natasha’s hand glanced off Steve’s shoulder as he stormed from the bridge.  His toes were kissing the doorway when Wanda spoke up behind him, less a question than a demand.   
  
“And what can I do?”   
  
He stopped.  It’d been a long spell since he was separated from hope by only a few feet of metal, and here it was. _Bucky_.  Hallelujah, and _fuck you_.  The humblest kind of salvation drifting out of infinity like it was keeping an appointment, hollering at Steve from the bottom of a long airless winter.  So he remembered how to say what had once come naturally to him in unforgiving times.   
  
“Do what you do best.  All you can.  You with me?”   
  
Back up against the window, the cloud of debris behind her like a corona, Wanda gave him a steely nod.  She didn’t see his tears, though.  Those were his to spill at the conclusion of a trail so cold that it could only end in space.


	4. Cut and Come Again

_Kings Station, Alexandria Superorbiter, Sun-Earth Lagrange Point Five, Thirty years ago. . ._  
  
  
  
Lots of kids on Kings Station wondered if the reclamation system ducts were oxygenated, if there was gravity, if someone (say, someone up to no good) crawled around in there and got stuck . . .would anyone find them?    
  
Steve knew.  Thrill-seeking hadn’t earned him that knowledge, though.  Because he weighed about as much as an average trash cube, and because he had a problem with his mouth and not being able to control it around vacuum-heads like Simon Nagle, Steve was pretty familiar with the reclamation system.  The air was as thin as his mom’s Sunday mystery loaf, but it was there.  And soon, he’d be sucking it yet again.   
  


The gridded corridor floor sped under him, making him dizzy in spite of the adrenaline, or maybe because of it. Probably it was more about the blood in his eyes, all that blurriness with the floor panels. And his feet never touched down, either.  For several bumpy, sickening moments, Steve held onto Nagle’s thick arm, one that was sprouting hair well ahead of puberty, and wished he was just a little taller, a little heavier.  He tried to jerk himself free and only succeeded in wrenching his balls even worse inside his twisted underpants.     
  
It’d always been easy for guys like Nagle to carry him like garbage, and to shove him where useless stuff usually ended up.  Reclamation was his favorite torture. Not exactly original, but being aware of Nagle’s lack of creativity didn’t give Steve much of an angle on him.    
  
Sure enough, the gridded floor gave way to solid solid panels and Steve knew where he was before Nagle sneered at him, “In you go, little man.”   
  
Nagle’s hands, fisted into the back of Steve’s pants and shirt collar, tightened as he reared back.  A second later, Steve flew across the threshold into the dim, grimy grey of the rec-lock.  His shoulder hit the floor, and he rolled, skidding like a sack of laundry until he came to a stop against a stack of rough cubes.  He goaded himself to keep upright, keep moving, keep hammering Nagle so he didn’t forget what little men could do. What they stood for, even when they couldn’t stand.   
  
Steve’s breath caught in his chest when he tried to get up, circuits of pain finding their connections in his ribs and shoulder.  He rolled to his knees as the rec-lock door hissed shut, framing Nagle’s red face in the diamond-shaped window.   
  
“You don’t. . .walk away,” Steve ordered. One shoe flat on the floor, two shoes, firm as they could manage with thin, trembling ankles inside them.  Steve got to his feet.  The comm crackled as Nagle spoke.   
  
“Yup, I do.  And you,” he said, looking to his right at the control panel Steve knew was there, just on the other side of the door. “Well, you get to crawl.  Have a nice trip, asshole.”   
  
The panel on his side of the door went dark, cutting off the comm and the control, but Steve lurched forward anyway.   
  
“No!”  He banged the window and pain spiderwebbed through his fist.  Behind the glass, Nagle laughed soundlessly.  Warning lights in the rec-lock flashed, yellow and red pulsing along the ceiling.  Lights flashed around the large, circular portal in the floor, too, the one that would open like an iris in just a few minutes.  Then there’d be sucking.   
  
Steve grappled with the inner rec-lock release handle.  Pointless, maybe, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to waste his breath pleading.  If Nagle wanted to send him tumbling through the ducts, he could damn well look him in the eye when it happened, watch him fight for it.    
  
Problem was, the window was five feet from the floor, and even standing on his toes Steve could barely see through it.  When he managed to peek out, Nagle was gone.  Cold, nauseating fear bloomed in the pit of his stomach, and then the flashing lights in the rec-lock suddenly went from a lazy pulse to an urgent one.  Steve zeroed in on the closest trash cube.  He yanked it from its stack, his swollen knuckles yowling under the skin, and stuck it up against the door.  It wobbled, caving into something squishy when he stepped up on it, but it boosted him high enough to see the hallway outside the window.   
  
Nagle was there, a few feet from the door, but his focus wasn’t on Steve or the rec-lock.  He was talking to Bucky.  Five and a half feet of deceptively-ready-for-a-fight Bucky, who’d put himself between a beast of boy, meanest in their class, and the object of his fun.   
  
Bucky nodded at something, and Nagle turned to look over his shoulder.  Bucky dropped to one knee and punched Nagle in the crotch, as hard and quick as Steve had ever seen anyone get laid out.  Once Nagle tipped onto the floor, Bucky kicked him in the lower back.  It shouldn’t have been so satisfying, how Nagle crumpled with his red face going nuclear magenta, but it was.  It was dark, and right, and Steve fogged the window with relieved laughter.   
  
Then the window filled up with Bucky’s face, too grim for any kid their age.  Over Bucky’s shoulder, Steve could see Nagle limping away toward the residence level, one hand on the wall and the other between his legs as he slid along.     
  
Bucky pointed through the window, and a faint crackle told Steve the comm had been switched back on, but the panel on his side of the door remained dark.     
  
“He knew what he was doing with this thing,” said Bucky through the comm. “Wouldn’t have guessed him for a techie.”    
  
Steve watched him worry his lip as he looked to the side, concentrating on some button-mashing of his own to get the door open.     
  
“Thanks for coming for me.”   
  
“Well I had to, there’s someone you gotta meet.”  Bucky glanced up briefly, flashing Steve a smile before going back to the panel.  “If you meet her and you still want to provoke dickheads into sending you on the shit-tour, I’ll bring you back here myself.”   
  
Steve looked up where the rec-lock lights were still swirling in warning.     
  
Danger never passed on the station, really, it just got recycled into something else.  Like disappointment.  Like worry.  Steve sighed and leaned on the door, trying to catch Bucky’s eye while he tapped away.   
  
“I’m sorry, Buck.”   
  
“Don’t be sorry, be smart,” Bucky replied.  “Got it. Cycling down, it’ll take a minute.”   
  
“A girl, huh?” Steve said, intrigue pitching his voice low. “Pretty?”   
  
Bucky came back to the window sporting a grin fit for something out of a cartoon.   
  
“Almost as pretty as me, but don’t let her fool you.  You’ll think she’s fancy when she talks, but her knuckles are skinned just as bad as ours.” He shook his well-combed head. “And unlike you, she never loses when it counts.”   
  
New people on the station were rare, Bucky should have been vibrating about it.  Instead, his smile faded as he examined Steve’s face through the window.  Remembering the blood, Steve wiped the cut on his forehead with the edge of his sleeve.  Bucky’s eyebrows crowded together.   
  
“Maybe she can teach me some moves,”  Steve offered.    
  
“Somebody has to,” Bucky said, softly, and his lowered eyelashes disappeared for a second behind the fog of his breath on the window. “I’d like to go just one sol without finding you on the wrong side of a door like this.”   
  
Steve swallowed, nodding.  Bucky was right.  But Steve was also right.  He loved that. He loved that every day since they’d met it was a little less impossible to feel like things could change. Even on top of a trash cube.     
  
The lights in the rec-lock stopped blinking as the seals began to hiss.   
  
“It’s just a door.” Steve leaned back, arms spread wide. “And which side is the whole point.”   
  
The panel on Steve’s side lit up again.   
  
Bucky smirked, knocked on the glass, and said, “You ready to come out of there?”   
  
“Hell yes.  Gotta meet a girl.”   
  
The window whisked away as the door slid open.


	5. Above Snakes

Two hours and the frost finally cleared enough to see through the window.    
  
_ James Buchanan Barnes. _  Presumed dead since the battle of Trippak.   
  
Above the face inside the stasis pod, Steve saw his own reflection in the glass, and for a minute he was shocked.  Not by the beard he hadn’t shaved or the lines he couldn’t hide, which were plenty familiar.  Age was always a bewildering reward for people who served and expected anything but.  No, Steve’s shock was a prelude to how he’d appear to the man on the other side of the window.   
  
“He looks almost the same as in his file.”  Nat sidestepped around the pod. “He must have gone into stasis right after the Trippak jump.”   
  
“The warship that followed him must have destroyed the  _ Havok _ right on the other side,” said Sam.    
  
The cargo bay filled with exhaust as ViSN continued to remotely de-power the pod.  The vibranium shuttle they’d dragged in, the Rambler, and the entire crew of the  _ Daybreak _ all stood in a fog of the vented stasis gas.     
  
They stood alongside Steve, waiting for a very rare kind of revival, and looked to him for how to make it fit into the life they’d built around each other.  Fifteen years and a stretch of months and Steve had no answers, just an unpacking of the fullness in his chest, a slow caressing of all the things they’d stopped asking him about a long time ago.   
  
Most of it was right there in the pod, metal arm and everything.  And he hadn’t aged much at all.    
  
“I should have cleaned myself up,” Steve mumbled, dragging a palm across his mouth. He could feel the tightening salt around his eyes where all the early tears had dried, and Sam’s smooth hand on the back of his neck.   
  
“You think he’s gonna care about that?”  Sam said.   
  
“It’ll be a shock.  We should’ve put him in the med bay.”   
  
“Safer to do it here,” Natasha said from his other side.    
  
Steve gave her a hard look. “He’s a friend, not a threat.”   
  
“Then why’d you dig up that thing?”  She nodded down at Steve’s wrist.   
  
He’d been fidgeting with the shield generator, telling himself the feel of the old device was awkward instead of what it really was: a missing piece falling right back into place.  It belonged. Bucky didn’t.   
  
“It’s something he’ll recognize,” Steve said.   
  
“Yeah, we’re not going to be much help there,” she replied, looking around the cargo bay at Wanda and Sam.  “Can you keep it together, Rogers?”   
  
All the years she’d spent practicing, distancing herself from what she’d been, and Nat still talked at him with ten meanings crammed into each sentence, studying which he’d pick up on.  He smoothed a finger over the painted star on the shield generator.   
  
“That’s the plan.”   
  
“Could’ve told me you were still looking all this time,” Sam said.   
  
“Yeah.”  Steve looked at his feet, half hidden by fog. “Letting go isn’t my strong suit.”   
  
“No one said it had to be.”   
  
“Sequence complete,” said ViSN, his voice echoing in the cargo bay.  “Barnes is still unconscious, however.”   
  
“Open it, Vis,” said Steve.  He motioned to Wanda, who’d been so still throughout the defrosting that she could’ve been invisible. “You’re up.”   
  
Wanda came forward as the pod window opened, and Natasha and Sam took a step back.  Like Steve, they subtly braced for the unexpected, a reflex honed by being knocked flat too many times in a split second of poor judgment. Or mercy. Unlike Steve, though, they probably didn’t feel bad about the instinct.   
  
Wanda’s dark eyes traced Bucky’s face, her fingers hovering over the slight tension around his mouth, set in thick stubble, then moving over the thin skin of his temples.   
  
“He remembers,” she said, and when she glanced at Steve her pupils glowed with deep pinpoints of crimson light. “A dogfight over a planet.  Oxygen tanks tipping over.  Laughter.”   
  
She smiled briefly down at Bucky.   
  
“He’s reliving all that, right now?”  Steve said, mouth dry.   
  
“Not reliving.  More like a hallway, and these are the open doors.” Wanda’s hands framed Bucky’s head.  Seen close together like that, they were alike, dark and drawn, and Steve worried just how much they were sharing in thought alone. “I see the last jump.  And farther down, a small bunk, shared. A woman in a uniform.”     
  
Also shared, in a way, Steve thought.     
  
“Peggy,” he murmured, watching Bucky’s face for a sign.  He wasn’t connected to Wanda’s unnerving gift, to the sight in Bucky’s mind, but he remembered those moments too.  From the other side.   
  
Wanda exhaled, withdrawing her hands and breaking her connection. “He’s way down, and fighting it, but he’s coming to the surface now.”      
  
Movement in Bucky’s throat had Steve swaying forward until he was almost inside the damn pod, the shield generator forgotten, his age and his angry years pushed aside.  Fearful as the first time he ever did it, in the bunk they’d shared from that night on, Steve put his hand to Bucky’s face.    
  
“C’mon Buck.”   
  
Again, Bucky’s throat moved, swallowing, and he opened his eyes.  He blinked and squinted at the lights in the cargo bay.  With a sound so timid and quiet it couldn’t be confused with a voice, he said, “Did we get ‘em?”   
  
“Hey Buck.”  Steve laughed through fresh tears, sniffing a little.  He looked around at the faces of his family, ending right where he started, sliding a thumb across Bucky’s cheek. “You fell off the map there for a while.  Thought you were dead.”   
  
Again, Bucky blinked rapidly, each flutter focusing his eyes more fiercely on Steve’s face. Then, he croaked, “I thought you were younger.”   
  
Steve laughed soundlessly and took stock of what he was actually seeing: A torn uniform with Accord patches, old blood speckling Bucky’s forehead, some gray hairs (far fewer than his own), and a less bulky frame than he remembered.  “Guess I’ll hold off on showing you a mirror.”   
  
With some effort, Bucky lifted his left arm free of the pod until it was level with his eyes, and in its gleaming surface had a look for himself.  A weak, sardonic smile dragged itself across his face.   
  
“Shit,” he said, and dropped his arm.

“That’s our motto,” Sam said.  He disengaged the locks on the lower half of the pod door and, shooting Steve a glance, held an arm out to Bucky. “Welcome to the  _ Daybreak _ . Sam Wilson.”    
  
Bucky stared straight through him.   
  
“Alright.  Fair enough.” Sam stepped back. “If I was a pod-sicle in space for fifteen years I might forget my manners, too.”   
  
“Fifteen?”  Bucky’s blankness turned desperate.   
  
“And a few months,” said Steve. “Take it easy, it’s okay. You’re safe.”   
  
Suddenly, violently unconvinced, Bucky gripped the edge of the pod with both hands, hoisted himself out, and promptly went to his knees before anyone could catch him.   
  
“Where are we? Is the Council-”   
  
Steve hooked an arm under Bucky’s chest and lifted him upright, easy as picking up a kid.  He felt the weight of him, with that strange metal imbalance, the slack muscle and the heat too, creeping in to replace what had been corpse-tepid.     
  
“War’s long over,” he said, easing a limp Bucky onto a nearby crate.  “The Council took its broken forces and retreated to Preaton.  Haven’t seen more than a blip of them for almost a decade.”    
  
Again, Bucky could only stare while Steve touched his shoulders, his head, his hands; Checking for tangibility, like maybe this was a cruel dream.   
  
Sam cleared his throat and said, “T’Challa and the rest of the Accord gathered everyone up from the dust and put us on a new track:  Find a planet we can call home.”   
  
“We’re in the Delta quadrant,” Wanda piped up, the only person in the cargo bay who seemed to remember that Bucky had asked a direct question, one with an answer that wasn’t decades old.   
  
“Delta?” Bucky’s eyes squeezed shut.   
  
“I am sorry to interrupt, but I’ve received a transmission from Themarun via subspace frequency,” said ViSN.     
  
Natasha said, “We did leave a comm with Clint, for emergencies.”   
  
“Okay, Vis, we’ll get back to him.” Steve turned his attention back to Bucky, who craned around at the sound of the AI.   
  
Coming out of his bleariness, Bucky examined the crew, taking their measure slowly, finally, as they stood among supplies and gear that were as well worn as they were mundane.  Confusion creased his face, and Steve guessed its origin:  No guns, no military-issue vehicles, not a single uniform. Bucky cleared his throat.  “You’re a. . .you’re all. . .what?”   
  
“Pioneers,” Natasha offered with a nod. “Fewer covered wagons, less dysentery, same concept.”   
  
As she talked, Bucky stared unbelievingly at the  _ Havok _ ’s vibranium shuttle.  It’d been his very small, very lost home, now shoved into a corner of the bay beside the Rambler, which was still caked in Themarun’s yellow dirt.   
  
Voice broken and deliberate, Bucky said, “Yesterday it was ugly as government cheese out there, and I was drowning in enemy fire, going down fast.  And today you’re telling me we just. . .started over.”   
  
“Lucky you.” Sam crossed his arms. “You skipped a helluva lot of hard years, Barnes.”   
  
Bucky studied Steve like he was abstract art, from his work boots and rolled sleeves up to where too much blond had turned to silver. “Did I?”   
  
“It wasn’t all bad. You’d have liked some of it,” Steve said.   
  
As if he’d forgotten to latch an airlock, Bucky stiffened, eyes wide. “Peggy?”    
  
Steve’s guts tumbled, making words he didn’t want to say that much harder to extract.    
  
“She-”   
  
“Carter was discharged from the science division and court-martialed after Trippak,” Natasha summarized flatly.  She leaned inside the stasis pod to look around, yanked on something, and came out with a canvas rucksack.  Bucky tensed.  She inspected the frayed pocket flaps and said, “They needed someone to blame.”   


Bucky’s head dropped and he huffed bitterly. “And I was dead.”   
  
It shouldn’t have come out that way, chronological pain that burned hard instead of the bare minimum that’d get Bucky on his feet.  Steve knelt beside him, old shame bringing heat to his face and a chill to his voice. “She’s been serving time, in stasis, for twelve years.”   
  
The thought of Peggy transformed Bucky’s face, his initial stunned awe at being resurrected crumbling to guilt where his eyebrows pulled down, his mouth too.  Steve watched a swell of anger swamp the little bit of buoyant hope he’d had.    
  
“She’s paying for what I did,” Bucky gritted out.  “And you came for me instead.”   
  
“Yeah we’re trying to figure that one out, too,” Sam murmured at Steve.   
  
Through the curtain of Bucky’s too-long hair Steve saw tears in his eyes. It was a wake of unfairness that had followed them since they’d found each other, tipping lives like unsecured cargo wherever they went, the three of them together.  Now just two.   
  
“I tried, Buck, I swear. I tried to get her out every day, every year, until they finally gave me a mission to keep me busy.” Steve sat back on his heels, his eyes tangled somewhere along the laces of Bucky’s boots.  “One they knew would take precedence.  Find a home, and do it quick.”   


“Only one man for the job, huh?”  The tilt of Bucky’s head, the reproach in it, was a blade with dull teeth.   
  
Steve ground his jaw.   _ So many ways to help _ , Bucky’d told him at seven, and fifteen, and twenty-two,  _ and none of them has to begin and end with you alone. _  Forty-something years was a long time to play that song on repeat, and stasis or not Bucky looked god-awful tired of dancing to it.   
  
Bucky swiveled to Wanda.  “You’re the one who helped me.”     
  
She’d taken the rucksack from Nat and set it at Bucky’s feet, nodding, more quiet than Steve would’ve liked, given what she might have seen in his mind.   
  
Bucky nodded back.  “Thanks, I think.”   
  
“This is Wanda.” Steve’s knees cracked loudly when he stood.   
  
“She told me, in here,” said Bucky, tapping his temple.  He couldn’t keep up with the intensity of her stare, though, with how she seemed to absorb him from flesh to metal to mind, and he fiddled with the rucksack instead. “We didn’t have people like you before.”   
  
“There have always been people like me,” Wanda said.  
  
“Russians?” Bucky replied.   
  
Sam laughed despite himself.   
  
“You okay?” Sitting a little more upright, like his back remembered its shape, Bucky inspected Steve’s face.  “You look a little like those beat-to-shit dropships they used to haul back from Preaton after a skirmish.”    
  
Steve looked down at Bucky’s face, the ghostly mischievous one he’d never really gotten over, and wanted to scoop him into a rib-crushing hug.  Something he’d been visualizing since they’d opened the cargo bay to go retrieve the pod.     
  
“Okay?” The word fairly squeaked, Steve’s excitement catching up to and overtaking all the fear and guilt. “You’re alive, Bucky!  Sitting right here! It’s a. . .well, it’s a fucking miracle. And I don’t have to tell you how rare those are.”   
  
“It’s a miracle!  Says one supersoldier to another,” Sam said, throwing an arm around Nat.  “On a spaceship.  Guided by an AI.  With a telepath, and a superspy.  Not to mention, me.”   
  
Steve’s ears went hot.   
  
“Don’t listen to him, Steve, you’re allowed to lose your cool,” Nat said.  “But it’s better if you have some to start with.”   
  
On his crate, Bucky shuddered with mute snickering.   
  
“Christ, I’m really that old.” Steve nodded. “You guys keep telling me, maybe I’m hard of hearing.”   
  
“Nah.  You’re still the scrawny kid who used to wear his mom’s O2 tank like a jetpack,”  Bucky drawled.  “Watching you topple over was the funniest damn thing I ever saw.”   
  
“Me too,” Wanda deadpanned behind him.   
  
At her voice, Bucky’s flash of charm faltered briefly, but he resettled on Steve’s face with all the expanding warmth of a young star. And Steve lit up.   
  
“You want a shower, change of clothes?” He said, cocking his head.  “Shave and a haircut.”   
  
A vintage smile, one that still held the word  _ punk _ in its curve, flitted across Bucky’s mouth.  He rallied enough strength to stand, without help, and pulled Steve into a hug.     
  
“I haven’t eaten in fifteen years,” Bucky said, warm against his neck.  “Let’s start there.”


	6. Bag of Nails

“You’re saying no one ever saw the _Distant Star_ again?”  Another forkful of Steve’s scramble disappeared into Bucky’s mouth.  
  
He ate without pausing.  He ate, and talked, and Steve had to stop himself from touching Bucky’s long hair while Sam and Natasha debriefed him about the minutes before he’d gone into stasis.  
  
“Not a scrap,” Natasha said, her eyebrow inching upward. “None of the debris around your pod matches the Council’s make.”  
  
Bucky went on chewing.    
  
 _Did we get ‘em?_ He’d gone to sleep hoping he’d done his part, protected what mattered, even if it meant he’d be lost forever.  The next day he woke up to eggs and coffee.  
  
As he leaned against the kitchen counter, watching Bucky’s blanket-wrapped shoulders, Steve felt the decades pile into his bones, heavy as sand filling up space in limbs that moved like a sleepwalker’s.  Bucky glanced across the kitchen to his right, at Steve, eyes bright with questions and lips too slow with answers.  
  
“You made this?” He waved a fork over his empty plate, the second Steve had served him in the span of twenty minutes.  
  
“Ran out of bad guys to put down, so I learned how to cook.” Steve blushed, stunned that he still could. “Sort of.”   
  
“He had help,” Sam offered.  
  
Bucky’s head swiveled between them.  He sat back and said, “I could eat more.”  
  
In the time between plates, Bucky’s left hand played deftly with the table knife in a way that made Steve’s stomach clench.   
  
He and Sam drilled everyday, sprinted and lifted weights, Natasha cleaned weapons nobody’d fired in years. Practice calmed the mind. Knife-play was no different, right?    
  
Bucky’s arm made it different.  Metal on metal.  How he’d learned it, earned it, made a difference.  The intermittent flick of a tongue made all the difference.   And Steve wasn’t the only one who noticed.  
  
“It wasn’t your fault.  Most of it,” Wanda said dreamily, transfixed by the motion of the knife.  She tracked up to his face.  “But you wrap it up like a gift no one wants, hide it, and try to forget it.”   
  
She’d been quiet at the other end of the table, observant like always.  But it went deeper.   _She_ went deeper.  They were connected, and she’d done it without warning.  Steve couldn’t be sure how long Wanda had been window-shopping in his mind, but Bucky had sensed her well before she said anything.  
  
Steve’s heart gave a thud for how forgotten she was in all this, and because of it, how exposed they all were to her.  Including and especially Bucky.  
  
“Wanda. . .”  Steve came off the counter, ready to intervene, but it wasn’t Wanda who stopped him.    
  
Bucky held up his hand.    
  
“It’s okay.  She asked first,” he said and then, slower, forming the words with gravelly precision, “ _ona vezhlivaya._ ”  
  
A younger girl, one Steve hadn’t seen in years, smiled at Bucky from across the table.  
  
“ _Nechevo ot menya pryatat'sya.  Ya tozhe iz dikovo lesa dikaya tvar_.”    
  
Bucky’s jaw jumped, and his eyes sketched toward the exit a little too quickly.  
  
Voice low, Natasha said, “We all hide things.”    
  
“And monsters don’t judge each other,”  Wanda replied.  
  
“Sweetheart, if you’re a monster you’re out of practice,” Bucky mused, feigning an ease that didn’t stick.  “And mousing around in someone else’s darkness is a good way to get bit.”  
  
“I’m not afraid of a three-legged wolf.”   
  
The wolf in question glanced at his metal hand, where the knife seemed to take its original form and he put it down.    
  
“Don’t,” Bucky warned.  And Steve panicked.  
  
Wanda, _his_ Wanda, would hate this.  She’d come out of her haze and hate herself for backsliding into viciousness all over again.  Bucky would suffer all over again. And Steve couldn’t help them both at once.   
  
So, he pleaded with her.  “This is wrong.  You wanted to _help_.”   
  
“He wants to remember the wrong things.  I can help with that.”  She stood, hands planted on the table, her old wildness stretching itself limber.  
  
Tiny red starbursts of light glowed in Bucky’s pupils and he flinched, gasping.  The blanket slithered from his back onto the floor. Steve saw Sam struggle to decide between grabbing Bucky or backing away altogether.   
  
“Wanda, enough!”  Steve clamped a hand on her shoulder and she turned her blazing eyes on him.  He froze.  They hadn’t thought to be afraid of her for so long, but now she looked at him the old way again: Nothing but a duty-blind soldier, muscling an unwieldy ideal over foreign rubble.  The loss of her gentler gaze cut Steve to the core.    
  
More than that, gravity abandoned him in a vertiginous rush. Sucked away from the physical world into a red-black fog, he found himself linked to Wanda on her tour of Bucky’s memories.    
  
The kitchen around Steve warbled, Nat and Sam blinked away, and everything that had been real stuttered to keep its existence like an old fluorescent lamp.  Nausea hit Steve instantly.  What he saw became a double-exposure, the bright kitchen and Bucky overlaid on a darker room, a prison cell that Steve remembered well.   
  
_I remember it, too._  Wanda’s voice echoed in the foggy non-place, as disembodied as Steve himself.   _The Council turned my city into an abattoir, a graveyard, and called it science.  And he was here.  Did you know?_  
  
 _Yes,_ Steve answered back in his own non-voice.  
  
No longer sitting at the table in the _Daybreak_ , Bucky now reeled in front of a cage, one in which Steve had deposited an enemy scientist sixteen years before.   
  
Dr. Stendauer, the Council’s fanatical disciple of Whitehall and Zola, stood across from Bucky, behind the thick iron bars but far from cowed.  Her cold eyes ate him up, greedy and calculating.    
  
 _How right she was_ , Wanda murmured.  
  
Bucky looked at Steve.  
 ** _  
_** _He knows I’m here.  I shouldn’t be here_ ** _._** Steve wanted nothing more than to back away, but he was stuck; He was a familiar cloud of nothingness in Bucky’s mind, only able to watch. ** _  
_** ** _  
_** _These are the doors I broke through.  Too late now,_ Wanda said. _How would he put it?  Can’t un-ring that bell._   
  
In the prison’s shadows, pained, unsure if Steve was real, Bucky shook his head like it was covered in spiders and then plunged himself into the memory at hand.  
  
 _“We do this and do it quick, you understand.” Bucky turns from Stendauer’s cell to check the corridor for guards.  When he’s sure it’s clear, he leans in. “Give me the injections and leave, pull foot for the shuttle and don’t look back or the deal’s off.  I swear to God if you even stop to tie your shoe you’ll get a bullet in the eye.”_ _  
_ _  
_ _“Oh, soldier,” she purrs. “Our serum is not the bright, flaming light of Erskine’s formula.  It’s cold.  And dark.  Are you quite sure you want to be alone for that?”_  
  
Steve wanted to scream _Don’t you fucking do it!_ as Bucky chewed his lip, the heavy lock turned, dry metal grinding together, and the cell door creaked.  But Steve wasn’t there now, hadn’t been there then, so nothing came out.  
  
 _“I’m sure I don’t want to wake up and find you within ten light-years of this planet when we’re done,” Bucky says.  He charges his pistol and levels it at Stendauer’s blonde head.  “Now move.”_  
  
 _Did you know him? Who he really was?_ Wanda whispered in Steve’s mind. _The kind of man who’d sell our future for a little strength._  
  
 _To protect me._ It was true, and had always been the truth.  Just like Steve’s relentlessness had been true, and the danger he’d courted as if his life meant nothing to no one.  The betrayal Steve witnessed in Bucky’s memory. . .it was done out of love. That was true. But seeing it -- hell, being close enough to just about smell it -- with Wanda looking on, the truth felt as empty as Stendauer’s cell.  
  
On the other side of the bars, Bucky curled in on himself, stifling a wail.   For an instant, the kitchen came stuttering back around him, bright and real.  Sam flickered there, holding onto a flailing Bucky in the chair like a tandem jumper, and Steve heard Natasha shouting somewhere behind him.  What had been a quiet, dank, underground cell became loud, assaulting, and Steve tried to move, to pull himself into solidity in the kitchen, but he got nowhere.  Then Sam disappeared.    
  
The chair and the kitchen disappeared.  Everything went quiet as mist and just as murky.  
  
Bucky stood alone, breathing in and out in a frosty plume, bathed in blue moonlight, and then it began to snow.  He was, Steve saw, two Buckys.  A solid man and a blur, a tracery of who he’d been, just behind him, blended and fading.  
  
 _It’s not him,_ Steve bargained in his non-voice. _He’s mixed in and mixed up._  
  
 _He can’t remember how to not be this,_ Wanda replied.  
  
 _Light as feathers, snow catches in the Soldier’s hair and doesn’t melt._  
  
In the non-place, Steve tried to shake his head, saying, _He will.  He does.  Me and Peggy-_ _  
_ _  
_ _He slides a knife from his thigh, flips it on end, and throws it straight at the blond man’s head.  With a sharp, spiraling sound, a shield springs out of the man’s right-arm bracer. A bright star shines at its center._  
  
Steve hit the floor.  The kitchen swooped up around him, catching him, replacing the moon and snow, and he found himself crumpled on the floor by the table, with Nat kneeling over him.  She flickered like static, mouth moving but soundless. Head lolling, Steve stared at the legs of the table as they blurred, melted, and then shifted.  They became-  
  
 _City buildings in the distance, glittering at sunset.  Cool night, no breeze, bright moons just waking to fullness._ _  
_ _  
_ _My home was beautiful,_ said Wanda, her non-voice lush with grief. _I think even he appreciated it._ _  
_ _  
_Steve fought another wave of nausea and took in the sight of Trippak’s capitol at dusk, seen over Bucky’s dark shoulder. _  
_ _  
_ _The Soldier watches his target, a sleek ship resting like a bird of prey on the enemy tarmac.  Accord fighter, new tech.  Eliminate the threat, seed fear in the local populous.  In his hand, the slim detonation key reads thirty-two seconds.  But the ship’s engines fire early, and it begins to rise._ _  
_ _  
_ _“Put it down, Bucky,” says a woman’s voice.  The Soldier turns to his right and looks down the barrel of a gun to the face of a dark-haired woman with red lips. She charges her pistol.  “Please don’t make me do this.”_ _  
_ _  
_ _No.  Wanda, we shouldn’t watch this. You shouldn’t-_ _  
_ _  
_ _I’m not in control,_ she said, and a shudder like pain rippled through their shared non-place. _  
_ _  
_ _Bucky. The name infects him with curiosity, makes him weak and hot.  Tears obscure her eyes.  Behind her, three hundred yards away, the man from the snowy woods runs at top-speed. His blond hair is bloody, uniform dirty, and he shouts, “PEGGY NO! DON’T! PLEASE, BUCK-”_ _  
_ _  
_ _She adjusts her aim.  The Soldier feels her bullet hit high and to the right.  Clean through, tissue damage but not bone, non-lethal.  He swipes his thumb across the detonation key and a quarter of a mile above the city, the Accord fighter’s starboard engine explodes.  He doesn’t wait to watch it fall, the trajectory is clear.  Mission complete._  
  
Again, a wave of pain shuddered through the non-place as Wanda stammered, _In a few seconds, half. . .half the city will be on fire.  People falling. . .their skin corroded by. . ._  
  
 _The woman’s pistol wavers, her body displays hesitation, shock, more tears. Her partner is one hundred yards away now, and the Soldier can just see the star on his bracer. The Soldier grabs the woman’s wrist, twists, her tendons strain under his hand.  He catches the falling pistol, turns, and runs._ _  
_ _  
_Steve said, _We tried to stop him.  To save him._  
  
 _Yes, you were both just  SO  Sorry,_ replied Wanda, her ghostly voice woven with venom.  
 _  
_ _Looking back is not necessary, but the Soldier does it anyway.  He wants to see them, the two enemy agents who’d failed their mission.  He thinks seeing them again might tell him why their voices itch in his mind and their faces feel like a spreading warmth.  But when he looks back, the Soldier sees only a blur, a tracery of himself running.  Smoke with a face like his.  And he knows its name is Bucky._ **  
** **  
**The kitchen walls circled, cabinets and tacked-up pictures closing in around Steve again, closing out the sight of Peggy and the blazing city.  Everything snapped down to the present as the solid walls of the _Daybreak_ ’s kitchen locked in like a completed puzzle. When Steve looked down it was into Bucky’s eyes, at the deep red glow inside, pulling him in.  He gripped a dazed Bucky by the front of his uniform, bearing down, hands clenched tight enough to rip the fabric clean-   
  
_“OFF!” The blond man screams up to the woman, one hand still fisted in the Soldier’s tactical vest.  “SHUT IT OFF!”_  
  
Slammed back into Bucky’s mind, into the middle of another chaotic scene of destruction, Steve would’ve vomited if he’d had a body and a stomach to deliver his guts all over the non-place.   
  
_Wanda?_ Steve floated, weightless, above a river of rushing air and debris. All of it rocketing toward an airlock as it opened, inches at a time. _Where are we?_  
  
 _The abandoned refinery, you don’t remember?_ She replied. _Orbiting the far side of the second moon._  
  
Between the clanging, tumbling machinery Steve saw himself and Bucky.  They were trapped, flattened against the opening airlock door, pinned by a conveyor belt and the escaping air, while Peggy crawled up a railing toward the control panel where Bucky had thrown Steve’s shield.    
  
It was the moment when Bucky had stopped struggling, stopped fighting, opened his eyes and _saw._  
  
 _Peggy.  As she pulls herself over the railing and turns around, Bucky sees her face: determined, embattled, beautiful. Her name crystallizes, and then his own -- which has slipped in, or has always been there -- Bucky.  The hand clenched on his vest tries to pull him again.  Where there’s Peggy, there’s. . . Steve.  Bucky turns his head and there he lays, Steve, like he’s pulling Bucky against him in their bunk. He wraps his hands around Steve’s arm.  But they are a billion miles from Kings Station. And they’re going to die.  Because of him._ _  
_ _  
_ _Everything pummels Bucky at once: memories, guilt, bolts and tools of every size, and a dusty whirlwind of shiny black minerals.  All of it batters Bucky and Steve as it flies through the airlock.  If Steve holds him, they’ll both go.  If Bucky lets go, maybe Steve and Peggy will too, in time._  
  
 _“Bucky, no. No, no, no.  Look at me.”  Steve struggles to hold on, one arm wrapped around a catwalk and the other losing its grip on Bucky. “Stay with me, buddy, please!”_  
 _  
_ _But it’s so loud, the cacophony of realization and the loss of oxygen through the yawning airlock, and Bucky feels depleted.  End of the line.  He looks across the room to where Peggy has lodged herself against the control panel, hugging it while her hair billows forward._   
  
_The face of a woman who knows how a mistake is paid-for,_ Wanda whispered, and somehow it cut through the roaring air, through the non-place, right into Steve’s heart. _You always said she was the best of you._   
  
_Through the rush of dust Peggy gives Bucky a pitiful look, desperate and broken.  Space waits for him, wants him more than anything, more than love, inches away and endless.  Bucky nods at her. Peggy slams the control panel and the airlock begins to close._  
  
 _I can’t,_ Steve begged in the non-place. _Please don’t make me do this again._  
 ** _  
_** _Releasing his hold on Steve’s arm, Bucky slips toward the edge._ ** _  
_** ** _  
_** _“NO!”  Steve uses every ounce of his strength to wrench the catwalk with his left arm until it warps.  The metal bends toward him, but holds, giving Steve enough length to reach out and grab Bucky again before he can be sucked out into space._ ** _  
_** ** _  
_** _With a tremendous, high metallic whine, the airlock seals shut.  Steve and Bucky and a pile of twisted metal fall six feet to the refinery floor.  Painting a bright trail of blood along the airlock as they go._  
 **  
** _It was a discount._ Wanda’s voice was small and solemn. _That’s what he thinks every time he feels it._  
  
 _Bucky screams until his voice breaks in half, long after his arm does.  Then, the eyes that’d finally recognized Steve and Peggy go glassy with shock._  
  
In the non-place, Steve could only watch himself, cradling Bucky as he went unconscious, and remember how it’d been the first time.  The sound of Peggy as she’d wrenched Steve’s shield out of the control panel and made her way down to them, damming up her tears for another time.  How everything had gone still and quiet while Steve sobbed, and gagged, unable to stop picturing what was left outside of the airlock. Wondering if Bucky’s arm would sail through space forever.  
  
But Wanda only showed Steve what Bucky showed her. No more, no less.  The hallway, Steve remembered, where Bucky had kept these doors shut until Wanda kicked them open.  
  
It made sense that there wasn’t much more.  As Bucky passed out, the Steve and Peggy from his memory blinked away, and the scene flickered apart.    
  
 _One rusty piece at a time, the surrounding refinery dims and disappears until Bucky lays in a pool of yellow light.  An ICU room blurs out of the darkness, then sharpens around him.  A medical bed materializes beneath him.  A soft white shirt stretches across his steadily breathing chest.  A metal prosthetic grows like languid mercury out of the left armhole._ _  
_ _  
_ _Bucky stares at nothing with the red-rimmed eyes and the hard-set mouth of a man who’s just turned away the only people left in the world who care to see him._  
  
Being not-there, Steve couldn’t even touch him.   
  
There, not-there, flesh or metal or ghost, Bucky paid less than he should have. That’s what he showed them.  That’s what he remembered.    
  
 _I used to agree._ Wanda’s non-voice was thin.  She sounded so tired. _When I read about it the first time, how the beast responsible for all that death was just a man, I used to think an arm was poor justice.  Maybe I still d-_ **_  
_****_  
_**_Stop, please._ Steve wanted out. He couldn’t trespass inside someone else’s suffering one second longer.  He had his own.  He wanted to cry real tears, in a real place, where he could spill out the pieces of his heart. ** _  
_** ** _  
_**Wanda sighed, _The wrong things-_  
  
“ _Ne nado evo tak_.”   
  
Natasha’s stark voice broke into the non-place with Wanda and Steve, filled up the quiet recovery room in Bucky’s memory, too.  Nat’s hardest self, made into sound, clashed with Wanda’s most wounded, and Steve felt it drawing Wanda out of Bucky’s mind.  
  
“ _Let. Them. Go._ ”  
  
The walls of Bucky’s memory shimmied.  The ICU trembled, and then blew apart.  Again, Steve felt an excruciating vertigo tumble him off axis, and he fell through a red-black fog until his body became his again. And it hit something solid.  
  
“OwwWanda,” Steve garbled.  He opened his eyes, blinking, and saw the overhead lights in the kitchen.  
  
“We’re okay,” she replied like a first-rate liar, from somewhere above him.  
  
Getting to his feet was easy enough, but nausea gut-punched Steve once he tried to stand up straight..  
  
“Easy, easy.”  Sam’s arms went around him to help him lean against the counter.    
  
The kitchen, it dawned on Steve by bleary degrees, was a minor wreck. Cutlery, plates, and cups littered the floor, the coffee can had been obliterated in a shower of brown dust, and two chairs were tossed against the far wall.  
  
Steve couldn’t process, couldn’t hold on to what he was seeing, expecting it all to drop away again.    
  
“Okay, kiddo, you can let it go now,” Natasha said, cautiously close to Wanda, but not stupid enough to touch her like Steve had.  
  
“It’s not me.”  Wanda’s breath was shallow.  She nodded across the table to Bucky.  “He’s the one who won’t let go.”  
  
Steve marked the pinpoints of light in Wanda’s eyes, then turned to look at Bucky.  Other than the wrinkles Steve’d put in his uniform (that’d been real?), and some wild hair, he looked much as he had when they’d all sat down for eggs. . .what felt like fifteen years ago.  Bucky looked the same, except for the deep crimson light.  
  
Around the kitchen Bucky cast his haunted eyes, searching out faces, and stopped at Wanda’s.  He wet his mouth, struggling to control the waver in his voice.   
  
“I should have let him be, but it was easier to be. . . like him.  I should have died, but it was easier to go to sleep.  If there was a chance I could live with it, everything I did,  I wanted to try.” He looked over at Steve, _For you_ written in the soundless spaces.  “I remember that.”   
  
Wanda flinched as Bucky sat forward, still twisted in the red with her.   
  
“I remember that all my life I never met anyone who hadn’t lost someone. Growing up without ever touching ground, I remember that, too.  Leaving Kings Station, bound for glory. . .”  Bucky broke off, keening, grinding the heel of his hand so hard into his forehead that Steve thought a bruise would form.   
  
Wanda looked helplessly at him, her face just as stricken as Bucky’s, pain still knotted to pain with an invisible thread. She whispered to Bucky, “We’ve all done things.  You don’t have to-”  
  
“I killed,” he said, and then winced as if he’d shouted it, said it wrong somehow.  “Not as a soldier but a murderer.  And sometimes I was a ghost, at sixes and sevens when I did it, but it happened.  All of it.”   Bucky grew into the words, settling into their shape.  He found the deadshot evenness that Steve remembered from their days behind long guns.  “We fought a war so long and so hard that nobody won.”    
  
When he was done talking, the silence was ravenous, eating up all the air in the kitchen. Sam looked at the floor, pensive, while Natasha’s fingers flexed at her sides, teasing weapons that weren’t there. If Steve had meant to be a comfort to anyone in the room, his failure was absolute.  
  
Bucky’s hands went slack on the table, open palms exposed, one ordinary and pink, the other reflecting everything.  “I never meant for any of it. . .it’s what I’m supposed to remember, right?” It shattered Steve, the way Bucky turned his beat-dog expression to each of them, waiting on an order.  “You saw.  And she can. . .see that, right?”  
  
Steve closed his eyes, but more vertigo waited for him in the dark.  He croaked, “Yeah, Buck. I saw.”  
  
“I see a list,” Wanda said, breathless. “Names written in too many languages, a list so long you could fly across it.”    
  
“And everybody’s got one of those.” Nat lifted her chin at Bucky. “Right soldier?”  
  
The connection broke its last thin tether, and crimson light faded from Bucky’s eyes.   He slumped back in his chair.   
  
“Everybody I know,” Bucky said, unfocused, to the kitchen at-large.    
  
Steve only realized Wanda’d been crying when she wiped her face.  She gave Bucky a sad smile, devastating in its pity, and said, “You did the wrong thing for the right reason, that’s what you should remember.  I told you. . .we’re not so different.  Remember that, too.”   
  
Natasha caught Steve’s eye, cocking her head toward Wanda.  He nodded, still too flattened to speak.  
  
“Come on, sunshine, time to rest,” said Nat, and took Wanda’s elbow to lead her away.  “We’ll let the boys clean up.”  
  
Not knowing where to move first, Sam settled on Steve and the two-hundred pound hitchhiker from space who looked like he was going to pass out.  Warily, Sam hooked Bucky’s metal arm over his shoulder and helped Steve lift him out of the chair.    
  
Steve smoothed the hair from Bucky’s slack face and said softly, “I’m sorry. I thought I knew. . .everything.”  
  
Over Bucky’s drooping head, Sam pulled a tight, sympathetic smile.  
  
“Hey, memory isn’t reliable, you know.  It’s a story we tell ourselves, same as any other,” he said to Steve.  “What you saw in there?  It’s not the same as knowing.”    
  
From the other side of the room, as Nat urged her out the door, Wanda mumbled, “He doesn’t know himself.”  
  
Holding Bucky up, shuffling along with Sam, there were too many arms for Steve to keep track of, a tangle of stories and minds, and he was too exhausted to know who she meant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. "she's polite."
> 
> 2\. "No need to hide yourself from me. I, too, am a wild beast from a wild forest."
> 
> 3\. "You don't have to do him like that.
> 
>  
> 
> all the love in the world for the wonderful and patient uminoko, who provided all the Russian phrasing for me.


	7. Mossbacks

Accompanied by fresh echoes of the chaos, and the memory of metal on metal, twanging starkly in the kitchen, Steve’s short walk through the crew quarters felt like trudge through quicksand.     
  
Bucky. . . pried open under Wanda’s sight, slumped inside an old forgotten uniform like every inch of him was trying to get away from the fabric.   _ Shisk-clink. Shisk-shisk-clink _ . Bucky flipping and twisting a knife meant for something a helluva lot worse than butter and potatoes.     
  
_ It was a different time, _ reverberated in that sound, too.  The excuse Steve had offered to Wanda, to Sam, for years. An explanation for the listless grasp on the cost of war soldiers like he and Bucky had succumbed to.  _ It was a different time _ , Natasha had parroted right back, with the bitter twist-of-mouth of someone whose craft had been swept aside as thoroughly as his own.     
  
But she’d learned to sow seeds because he asked her to.  Decided she could do good because he’d convinced her she already was. Nat had practiced and perfected her realness in the new world.  But Steve, if he held himself under the light his crew shone, hadn’t exactly made an equal effort.   
  
He walked seven steps past the room in which he’d deposited an exhausted, traumatized Bucky and never felt more like a bygone notion.   
  
On a planet, on a station, on a ship, on a very serious search for a place to call home, people still did what they could record history.  If only so they could slap a title on it, call it  _ It Was A Different Time _ , and consider it done and dusted.  Until he’d been dumped inside Bucky’s mind, Steve thought he was one of those people, too.     
  
But if what he saw made Steve question the fifteen years he’d spent pushing out into the wilderness, not claiming ground for the wrong reason, one thing was certain.  Bucky sure as hell wasn’t ready to practice with a shovel the way he did with a knife.   
  
Then there was Sam.   
  
The door to Steve’s quarters opened, and he saw Sam as he often had during scattershot nights across the previous four months: gray tank, sweatpants, socks, energy and invitation wrapped in smooth skin.  Rembrandt couldn’t have captured eyes more warm and rich in the dim light.     
Tonight, though, Steve found him sitting at the edge of the bed, ready to leave instead of taking up the whole bunk with his splayed knees.  A lopsided smile in place of an easy one.    
  
“Is he alright?”  Sam said, and then shook his head. “I mean, all things considered.”   
  
Steve sighed and rubbed his face.  “No idea.  It took me. . .well, it took a long time to pack up the mess I made in the war.  Last thing in is the first thing out, you know.  I expect it’ll be the same for him.”   
  
Steve leaned against the wall, drinking in Sam’s face in the soft yellow glow, and then he noticed the pile of stuff in Sam’s lap.   
  
“What’s that?”   
  
“Thought it might freak him out, you know.  Too much too fast.”  Sam held up a few items, a collection of his personal things, gathered from around Steve’s quarters.  “Coming back into the world is hard enough.”   
  
There was a tablet, a bag of snacks, a sweatshirt, a bottle of cologne with six precious drops left in the bottom, and a photo.  Steve took this last item and stuck it back in its spot on the wall of memories over his nightstand.  The picture of Sam went between Peggy’s portrait and a shot of Steve, Bucky and Peggy as raw recruits.  The three of them were laughing hysterically as they held up the waste-disposal tubes on their flight suits.  Steve sat down on the bunk.   
  
“I’m not hiding this, any of it,” he said, depositing the rest of Sam’s stuff onto the table. “But, I appreciate the thought.”    
  
He squeezed Sam’s hand, and felt the return of it instantly.  Sweet as it was, it didn’t cut the guilt much.   
  
Sam said, “You’d do the same for me.”   
  
“Always.  You seem to like a guy with some mileage, but you don’t deserve this kind of baggage.  I’m sorry if this is. . .”  Steve looked him in the eye.  “I don’t want you to worry that this’ll change things.”   
  
Sam stood, and the waist of his pants dipped loose and low across his hips.     
  
“Oh, I’m not worried.”   
  
He stretched his arms up to lean on the bulkhead over the bed, giving Steve a full accounting of muscle and confidence in one tight package. He met Steve’s frank admiration with a familiar, hungry grin.   
  
Steve gnawed his lip and let his head droop, rubbing his neck. “Guess it’s just me, then.”   
  
Sam reached across him to snatch up the bag of snacks, and planted a kiss on Steve’s bowed head.   
  
“You know where to find me.  Sleep tight.”   
  
The door closed behind him and Steve was alone, a circumstance he could feel shitty about or choose to overcome. He undressed, and as he hung his pants over the back of the chair something heavy hit the floor with a thump.  Steve stared down at it, a craggy lump of yellow rock that he’d pocketed before leaving Themarun.     
  
A light year behind the  _ Daybreak _ ’s wake, what would Clint and his friends be doing tonight?    
  
Steve scooped up the little rock and set it on the nightstand.   
  
He slipped into a cold bed and turned over, putting his back to the clock, the rock, and the door.  The only thing he had left for company were his expectations, ones that had so far let him down spectacularly.  A few feet down the corridor, maybe, Bucky would be doing the same.  It brought Steve no closer to sleep, and as he stared across the pillow, he saw his right arm lying there with the shield generator still buckled tight, forgotten.     
  
Wanda could show Bucky her history without ever speaking.  Steve didn’t have her gift, the encompassing power of images so real they hurt, so whatever Bucky needed to know about the years he’d skipped in a night’s sleep, it would have to come out the old-fashioned way.  It wouldn’t hurt less in words than in pictures, learning that the world he’d bought with his sacrifice wasn’t any world at all.  And that the family he’d managed to scrape together was pretty much gone.   
  
Steve unclasped the device from his arm and turned over to drop it on his nightstand.  As he did, there was a knock on his door.    
  
“Buck?”   
  
“Yeah,” came the unsure voice on the other side.   
  
“Come on in.”   
  
Heart skidding, Steve squinted at the silhouette filling the doorway.   
  
Bucky moved through the dark room, quick and purposeful, and dropped down beside Steve’s bunk.  He held a pillow under his arm, just like he had a thousand times back home on Kings Station.   
  
“You wanna. . .here.”  Steve scooted back, making room in the bed, hoping ‘eager’ still sounded inviting to Bucky.   
  
“The floor’s fine,” he replied with a quick smile, depositing the pillow up against the nightstand.   
  
Bucky’s eyes slipped over the collected items on the nightstand, pausing on the shield generator, then tracked upward to the wall.  He smirked at Steve’s collage of photos, old passes, dried leaves and flowers that were steadily taking over like a multi-colored fungus.   
  
To Steve, studying him by the amber light of the clock, Bucky looked harder, leaner than the last time he’d seen him, boarding the  _ Havok _ , headed for an unknown fight.  The turn of his mouth, too, even in shadow, spoke to the same kind of undefined course.     
  
He’d pulled his hair back and changed into Sam’s donated t-shirt and sweatpants.  And though his attention was drawn to memorizing the things Steve had chosen to display, Bucky always knew when he was being observed, sketched. . . _ kept _ .     
  
“What?” he said.   
  
“I miss her,” Steve said, watching Bucky’s jaw jump. “Didn’t get a chance to tell you before you. . .before everything went hammer and tongs in the kitchen.  I miss her too, and we’re gonna get her out.  I promise.”   
  
Bucky stared at Peggy, tucked beside the old and new, smiling that lush scarlet smile forever on Steve’s wall.  Then he looked at Steve, like he was some kind of photo, too, stuck on someone else’s wall.   
  
“Sure, old man,” he said, reaching out slowly to stroke Steve’s gray hair with such a light touch, such wide, sad eyes, that goosebumps prickled all over Steve’s scalp.  “She’ll love all this.”   
  
Steve wet his mouth.  “You don’t?”     
  
All he got for his attempt at post-trauma flirtation was a tight smile from Bucky, and Steve stopped himself from catching that warm, familiar hand as it withdrew.   
  
They weren’t old or young in the dark.  Steve could be small again and Bucky confident, and a dim little room with a bunk could be anywhere in the galaxy, any time.  But they couldn’t pretend it wasn’t emptier by a third.   
  
Steve watched him settle on his back, left arm tucked up under his head, and Bucky’s eyes eventually drifted shut.  Again, though, he felt Steve staring, and Steve didn’t want to ruin the quiet with his irrepressible need to pull on every thread, but-   
  
Eyes still closed, Bucky said flatly, “Do you really want to talk about it now? Because I sure as shit don’t.”   
  
“No,” Steve replied, frowning.  A sudden chuckle bubbled up in him, uninvited but warm, and he said, “I just didn’t think you’d want to sleep again so soon.”   
  
Then Bucky did open his eyes, long enough to reach over and pull Steve’s left hand down until it lay on his chest.  He kept it there, pressed with his own hand, just firm enough to feel the heartbeat inside.   
  
“What I was doing,” Bucky murmured, “I wouldn’t exactly call it sleeping.”   
  
Steve sank into his pillow, eyes heavy.  “Yeah, me neither.”


	8. The Last Stemwinder

_ SAS Pathfinder, Accord Science Division, Trippak Planetary Defense, Nineteen Years Ago. . . _ __   
__   
__   
“Everyone. . .uh, okay?”   
  
He checked.  He couldn’t help it.  Right at the end, as they collapsed together on a bunk that grew smaller by the minute, Steve ran his eyes over their limbs to check for bruises.  Even as they’d been in the thick of it, with Peggy learning the places she could grip hard as she liked, and Bucky laying into him with more  _ want _ than Steve’s old body could ever accommodate, he worried that he’d hurt them somehow.   
  
“They’re killing us out there,” Bucky muttered under his arm.   
  
Steve raised his head, tried to catch a look, but Bucky remained still and soft beside him.  Like he hadn’t spoken at all, hadn’t answered the wrong question.  Looking down across Bucky’s body (checking, still checking) led Steve’s eyes to the coat hook where Peggy’s dirty flightsuit hung, sporting several charred holes.   
  
He’d marked the state of their uniforms when they’d first dragged him into his quarters.  But then there’d been a helluva lot of touching, a flood of it, half a year of  _ I missed you _ s and heads of dark hair swimming over him, and Steve’d lost the questions he had under all that need.   
  
“It was a bloody meat grinder,” Peggy said, and Steve turned to the other side of the bunk to find her watching him, her fingers worrying new calluses at edge of the sheet. “We barely made it off Preaton with our skins when Command ordered twelve squads to report to Sci-Div-”   
  
“For enhancement,” Steve finished for her.  When she nodded, he sank back into the crowded pillow.  “That’s not gonna happen.”   
  
Bucky’s arm came down.  “You know something we don’t?”   
  
“Matter of fact, I do,” Steve replied, eyes closed, but Peggy’s voice and her laser-focus followed him into the dark.   
  
“Will you be divulging this secret or shall we play charades?”   
  
As Steve’s eyelids drifted open, he found Peggy and Bucky hovering, each of them up on one arm, waiting.  He scrubbed a hand over his face, faintly distracted by the mingled smell of them on his fingers.   
  
“Doc’s got orders to crank up the production of his serum.  They plan to use it full-scale, on everyone that can take it.”   
  
“Son of a bitch,” Bucky swore.   
  
Peggy’s face went steely.   
  
“He doesn’t approve.  He intends to resist, doesn’t he?”   
  
Steve sighed.  It wasn’t the conversation he intended to have in this particular setting.  They’d missed a lot, including each other, he wasn’t keen to put this stain on whatever time they had.   
  
“That he does,” he said, nodding.   
  
“But, you got it,” Bucky said, spreading his hand on Steve’s chest like he could pull the miracle right out of skin and bone, or hold it in place.  He went quiet around the full picture of it.  His eyes cut a trace right through Steve, through bed and the floor and beyond.  “You’re. . . the last one off the line, huh?”   
  
Against his shoulder, warm and warning, Peggy mumbled, “Oh, Steve.”   
  
Bucky’d always been the biggest of them, their wall against the world.  Nothing about taking Erskine’s serum had given Steve more grief than the thought of Bucky feeling like he’d lost the only job he cared about.  That Bucky’s affection might slip the spectrum from red hot to dark green.   
  
“It doesn’t mean-”   
  
“I know what it means.”     
  
The mile-wide stare sharpened down to love.  All Steve’s worry, the poison of it, dissolved at the edges.  Bucky’s mouth hitched at the corners. “It means you’re something else, punk. Always were.”   
  
Pink rose like watercolor from Bucky’s collarbone to his cheeks, and Steve melted toward it, kissed it from its low beginning all the way up to the hungry shade that touched Bucky’s lips.   
  
“What did Dr. Erskine say, precisely?” Peggy said over his shoulder.   
  
If Bucky seemed torn about the loss of Erskine’s serum, Peggy looked downright relieved to sweep it off the table. Steve hadn’t anticipated that.  It’d be damn hard to win a war without that edge, whatever her fear about Steve’s place in it, she knew that much.   
  
“That the, uh, principles that guided the original program aren’t in play,” he replied, scooting up against the wall, making the bunk shimmy. Doc had shaped it for him the simplest way, the sketch of an ideal Steve could’ve drawn himself.  It was convincing the way truth always was, a thought close enough to be his own.  It was about souls, and what mattered about them in the first place.  And his felt about as big as it had before the injections, so he figured his choice had been the right one.   
  
Steve reached out to twist a strand of Peggy’s hair between his fingers.  “They don’t care if they’re making heroes or monsters anymore, just that they ride for us.”   
  
Bucky snorted and rolled against Steve’s side.  “Yeah? What else does ‘Doc’ say?”   
  
“We’re, uh, going to destroy the serum, the formula, all of it,” Steve said.  It sounded so fictional out loud.  “Not sure what that looks like, exactly, but. . . what’re you doing?”   
  
“He’s going to need help.”  Nude, moving through Steve’s cozy quarters like a droid on a mission, Peggy began yanking on bits of clothing, some of which were Bucky’s.   
  
“It’s the middle of the night,” Bucky groaned.   
  
“Do you imagine that acts of treason are better accomplished in the light of day?” she hissed back, and then shook her head, resolved.  “If it’s to be done, best to do it quickly, now, before anyone else is involved.”   
  
Steve went cold. “You’re not involved.”   
  
Peggy stared him down, and all the broad, bulging extra inches of him meant less than nothing.   
  
“I most certainly am  __ involved .  And I intend to maintain my involvement when Dr. Erskine requests my immediate transfer to the lab.”   
  
As she scraped her hair back into a ponytail, Steve felt the bed dip.  Bucky moved to sit at the edge, hunting around in the dark for his socks.   
  
“You too?” Steve muttered.   
  
His back bowed, Bucky nodded.   
  
“I spent six months of this shit tour learning a hard lesson,” he said, without turning around.  “Get comfortable just doing whatever the hell she puts in front of you and you might see the next sunrise.”   
  


  
  
As gingerly as he could, Steve deposited the mangled molecular stabilizer on top of a growing pile of destroyed equipment, all of it gathered into one huge bin in center of the lab.  He stood up, dusting his hands as Dr. Erskine shuffled beside him.  He held a bottle of pretty rare vodka cradled in the crook of his arm, and his glasses had slipped to the teetering end of his nose.   
  
With a sigh, and a sidelong glance at Steve, Dr. Erskine uncapped the liquor and poured half the bottle over the collection of tablets and equipment.     
  
“It’s all yours, Sergeant,” he said grimly, and turned to Bucky.   
  
Standing by, a little too eagerly, maybe, Bucky nodded.  But Erskine shuffled away, patting Steve’s shoulder weakly, unprepared to watch what came next.  Bucky leaned forward and clicked one of the lab’s burners against a vodka-soaked stack of broken data sticks.   
  
The bin went up like the Fourth of July.   
  
“It can’t be as simple as all that,” Peggy said, hands on her hips.   
  
Steve watched her through the filmy mirage of burning plastic and glass.   
  
She could’ve been standing at an encampment on Trippak, the blue of her rough-worn fatigues flaring richly by firelight.  The Sci-Div lab was a long way from the planet’s surface, but fire was fire, even on a space station.  If allowed, it killed an ideal as easily as wood.   
  
Smelled god-awful, though, even with the exhaust fans whirring at full blast.   
  
“There are backups, surely,” Peggy insisted. “And there’s the thorny subject of  _ repercussions _ .  Of which I’m concerned you’ll suffer the worst, Doctor.”   
  
Dr. Erskine swiveled on his stool, away from the micro-inducer that steadily vaporized several gallons of serum; His life’s work completing a series of altered states from thought to liquid to gas, and then to nothing.    
  
“Not if they intend to win the war, my dear,” replied Dr. Erskine, and shook his head.  Steve thought he looked older than ever, but lighter.  He floated inside his pajamas, under his lab coat, and the eyes behind his glasses were sleepy but enervated.  Again, he wagged his head.  “No, they need me too much.  They’ll put someone here to watch over me, the Stark boy, perhaps.  Won’t that be interesting, an idealist shackled to an egomaniac, engineering victory together.”   
  
Beside the bin of melting research materials, Bucky snorted.  “Scientists are damned odd.”    
  
Backups weren’t Steve’s worry.  He’d been at the lab long enough to know that nothing with the serum’s classification ever left the room.  Except the soldiers themselves.  The other half of Peggy’s concern, though, had serious weight.   
  
“Doc, I’m with you, you know that.  But I’m getting a bad feeling about this,” said Steve.   
  
“Of course you are, good people don’t take pleasure in destruction,” Peggy interjected solemnly.  She went on breaking data sticks, chucking them into the fire like kindling.  “Even when it’s necessary.”   
  
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life, Steven.  As sure as I was about you.”  Erskine slid stiffly off his stool and gathered up the tablet drives at Steve’s station.  “We must eradicate the data, leave no trail,” he said, jostling the drives until Bucky stalked over to grab them from him.     
  
“Can’t fight ‘em, but we don’t have to help them,” Bucky said, nodding to himself. The tablets hit the fire with a clatter and a burst of upset sparks. “That about the shape of it, Doc?”   
  
“Precisely.”     
  
“For some of us, the fighting’s just begun,” Peggy said, evenly, to no one but Steve.    
  
“Yeah,” Steve mumbled, nodding to the floor. “What kind of idiot jumps into a fight just because he might be able to stop it?”   
  
Bucky’s and Dr. Erskine’s voices answered in an odd harmony across the lab.  “The right kind.”   
  
Peggy’s eyes slipped from Steve down to the fire.  There, she seemed to mull the intel while it burned, all the ways this would eat them up, change them, more than Steve’d already been altered.  Until now, it’d been just her and Bucky scaling the height of war, whatever that was. How someone could really know the top from the bottom of a thing like that was beyond Steve.  But not for long.     
  
Erskine palmed the half-empty bottle of vodka and gathered three mismatched glass beakers from the lab table.  He sloshed liquor into each of them, and pushed them toward Steve, Peggy, and Bucky.     
  
“I think my deputies in this noble quest should share a drink with me.  Such faces! Don’t judge, _ lieblingen _ , it makes the doubting part easier, trust me.”   
  
With uneasy glances all around, Steve, Peggy, and Bucky each took a beaker in-hand.   
  
“ _ Prost _ and  _ l’chayim _ ,” Erskine said, cheerfully grave, and lifted the bottle.  “May the better path never lead to regret.”   
  
“To the better path,” Peggy said.   
  
“To good men and women,” Bucky said.   
  
“To the right thing,” Steve said.    
  
With some care, he clinked his beaker against the others.  But the liquor didn’t hit him like it should’ve, didn’t make his throat and chest feel like a stricken match.  And the shifting eyes around him held flashes of worry.     
  
Peggy’s especially.   
  
Maybe it was a warning, how she seemed to be stuck on the image of Steve, the new one,  bloodied on the frontlines instead of safe in a lab.  How Bucky’d gone quiet as pre-dawn, standing closer than usual, because there was this new kind of battle just itching to gobble them whole.  That maybe no matter how hard or how fully they rode for the right thing, they’d all end up drinking together again.  Soberly.  Present and accounted-for at the end of  _ good  _ and  _ right. _


	9. Trig the Wheel

Steve didn’t hate spacewalks, he hated spacewalks in the middle of a black sea of nothingness, freckled with too-distant stars, without so much as a nebula to look at for orientation.     
  
Twenty minutes into his repairs on the deep-space antenna, Steve saw three sparkling flashes of light off the  _ Daybreak _ ’s port side.  The lights were momentarily brighter than the field of stars around them, not celestial bodies but three vessels bursting out of FTL.  And they’d done it at a fair distance from where Steve and his crew were parked.   
  
His Highness was considerate that way.   
  
Steve sighed inside his helmet. “Is that who I think it is?”    
  
“‘Fraid so,” Natasha confirmed over the comm. “You want to stay out there and wave at them from the front porch?”   
  
He tucked the old circuit boards into the right-leg pocket of his suit and stood up on the hull of the ship. Swaying as his mag-boots remained locked, Steve couldn’t see much of the oncoming ships apart from their steady light.   
  
“How much time do I have?” He could still manage the new boards, maybe.  Steve opened his left-leg pocket flap and, with his bulky gloves, teased out the replacements. “Nat?”   
  
The comm channel crackled, still open but silent.  Then a deeper voice, softer, finally answered.   
  
“She’s gone and she, uh, gave me the comm.”   
  
“Bucky?” Steve paused, surprised, and the new boards slipped from his hands.  For a second, standing on the roof of the  _ Daybreak _ he was a bear in a spacesuit trying to gently catch a pair of butterflies, scrambling to collect the important (and damn fragile) boards before they floated away.  At the comm, Bucky would be hearing him grunt and curse.  Once he’d recaptured them, Steve exhaled and said, “You okay up there?”   
  
“Mercy me, what do I do? I’ve never handled all this fancy spacejunk before. So many blinking lights,” Bucky deadpanned.  “I’m fine.”   
  
He sounded fine, better than he had in four days of skulking around the ship since the thorough hobbling they’d all gotten in the kitchen.  Steve squatted and began slotting the new boards into the antenna’s maintenance panel.  “How long before they’re on top of us?”   
  
“At their current speed, I’d say you have forty minutes,” Bucky replied immediately. And over the comm, inside Steve’s helmet, he sounded achingly normal.  Give him a job, any job, and Bucky could always turn it out.  It made Steve stupidly happy.  It also made him feel guilty, because he’d assumed that wouldn’t be possible.   The comm clicked opened again and Bucky said, “Why?  Are you in trouble?”   
  
_ No more than usual, _ Steve thought.  Accord reps had been informed about Bucky’s arrival, but Steve had been circumspect about the details.  Their leader was notoriously unaccepting of that kind of opacity, and he’d be asking Steve to make it all clear as glass in just under forty minutes.   
  
“I have to shave and get changed,” Steve said, grimacing as he re-locked the maintenance panel.  “Sorta have to do that with royalty.”   
  
During the silence that followed, Steve turned and made his way toward the rear of the ship.  He took several long strides, disengaged his mag-boots, and propelled himself forward with the momentum.  Firing the jetpack made him smile, as it did every time.  It was the best part of spacewalks, and it never got old.   
  
As he flew, skimming over the back of the  _ Daybreak _ , the comm in Steve’s helmet crackled again.   
  
“Do I have to?”  Bucky said, warily. “Shave?”   
  
“Just open the bay door, Buck.” Steve tucked himself tight as he reached the ship’s aft, changed direction, and rocketed downward. “And yes.”

  
  
The  _ Champion _ was also called the  _ T’Chaka _ , after the man who’d been both, before his son had taken the mantle and the ship.  If the  _ Daybreak _ was a scrappy mid-sized beater of a spaceship, a youth on the prowl through a strange world, the  _ T’Chaka _ was its stately and intimidating parent; one that, though its days of fighting and exploration were long over, everyone knew better than to provoke.  Especially with the Dora Milaje guard ships always nearby.   
  
Steve led Natasha, Sam, and Wanda through the  _ T’Chaka _ ’s corridors.  Bucky took up the rear, flanked (against Steve’s advice) by two Accord guards and two dark, statuesque women. And his hands were bound, against Steve’s more vehement wishes, by circlets of hard-light and vibranium.  The restraints were as elegant as they were strong, like everything built by Wakandans.   
  
As the entourage approached the command deck, Steve glanced over his shoulder.    
  
Clean-shaven jaw set like a brick in mortar, Bucky stared ahead.  The woman on his left walked at a greater distance than her partner on the right.  It’d done Steve no good to protest the precaution, and even then he’d hesitated.     
  
The great glass portal to the command deck slid open, revealing T’Challa, King of Wakanda and de-facto leader of all that remained of humanity.  He was, Steve thought, unfairly handsome these days, his silver days.  In every other sense, T’Challa was as fair as circumstance allowed, and it’d made their relationship interesting, at times.   
  
“Welcome back, Captain,” T’Challa said warmly, grasping Steve’s forearm.   
  
“I was about to say the same to you,” replied Steve, leaning into the embrace.     
  
T’Challa was dressed in black-on-black suiting, so Steve hadn’t noticed the armband at first.  But as he leaned back, his eyes were drawn to the strip of fabric, then to their leader’s face.    
  
“There’s little time for the reception you all deserve, I’m afraid.”  T’Challa’s smile faded as he looked over Steve, the crew, and Bucky. “Come, all of you.”   
  
  
Once T’Challa sequestered them in his office to the right of the command deck, Bucky’s guards were dismissed.  His restraints remained, but Steve didn’t get the opportunity to bring it up again.   
  
Leaning against his broad desk, addressing Steve’s crew as they sat around an ancient wooden table, T’Challa laid out a chain of tragedy that punted everything else to the backburner.  While Steve and his crew had been flying, while they’d been feeling Themarun’s sun on their faces and having a grand old time acting like heroes again, the fleet had been dying.   
  
“It is no secret that struggle has been on the horizon for many vessels in the fleet.  Running forever was never an option.  We simply hit the threshold sooner than anticipated,” T’Challa began, like a man who was sorry he’d learned the right tone of voice for this kind of speech.  He looked them each in the eye, with Steve taking the deepest of T’Challa’s untold sorrows.  “There were fires aboard three civilian ships, two from mechanical failure and one deliberate.  One of our fuel vessels was crippled when its guidance system malfunctioned and they drifted into an asteroid field.  On the  _ Venture _ there was a protest over rations, it became a riot, and then it became a standoff.  Twenty-two workers were killed.”   
  
T’Challa clasped his hands loosely as he finished, and Steve stared again at the armband.   
  
“Resources are that low?” Natasha said, breaking the mute horror in the office.   
  
“Despair is that high,” replied T’Challa.  “Those are just some of the stories.  It would take days to explain the events of the last six months, to number the things we need and simply can’t produce, to calculate the cost in lives and in hope.  Which is why the fleet must drop anchor now.  On Themarun.”   
  
The mood around the table tensed visibly.   
  
“Well, I guess it’s too late to call Clint back,” Sam said.     
  
Steve sat forward.   
  
“Wait, hold on,” he said.  “That planet isn’t an option.”   
  
Themarun was a name T’Challa should never have known.  Bypassing the spike of betrayal in his gut, Steve held T’Challa’s gaze.   
  
“You made the call, which is what I’ve always asked of you,” T’Challa said. “I disagreed.”     
  
Silver years or not, the man still moved like a cat.  He came off the edge of the desk and stood at the head of the table, arms crossed.   
  
Voice gentle, hiding the current of strength under it, T’Challa said, “Advanced scouts are already en route.  They will establish relations with the local residents, based upon your report.”   
  
“I didn’t send you my report,”  Steve murmured, afraid to look around the table to the faces of his crew, unwilling to believe any of them would go over his head.  Across from him, Wanda caught his eye and shook her head. ****  
  
“They didn’t betray you,” T’Challa said.  “ViSN is a Stark creation, lent to the Accord to assist with your search.  Retrieving the analyses from the last several months of your journey became urgent, so Stark installed a subspace auto-sync program.  We knew about Themarun four sols ago, from the moment we re-established the comm link with the  _ Daybreak _ .”    
  
“Tony,” Steve said, head in his hands.  He silently weighed the benefit of ViSN’s place in his crew against the satisfaction of knocking Stark on his ass.  Just once.  For old time’s sake.   
  
“There are generations of people already living there,” Natasha said.      
  
Sam cleared his throat and elaborated.  “Cities, farms, a whole culture. More than one, actually.”   
  
“I’m aware,” T’Challa said with a nod.   
  
“So, it doesn’t matter that there’s a civilization standing in the way?” Steve saw the nigh-on literal picture of history repeating itself before his eyes.  And as it had the first time around, the sickness of it brought him to his feet.  Knuckles on the table, firm against wood salvaged from a planet they’d lost to this same mistake, Steve stood and said, “‘The guts to stick your hands in the mud and try to build something better.’  That’s how it started on Earth.  It was a lie back then, and nothing’s changed.”    
  
With the resolve of a thousand-year-old tree rooted to a mountain, T’Challa said nothing.   
  
“You realize what you’re talking about?  This is how the Council won,” Steve said, coming around the table with resentment building in his voice.  “They’re not even here and they’re still winning.  We’re doing it for them.”    
  
“Steve,” Wanda warned.   
  
T’Challa’s arms came down, but his posture lost none of its force.  He leaned into Steve, every inch, every molecule the man he’d been elected to be.   
  
“You were given this task because of your exemplary sense of duty.  However, while you may feel responsible for the fate of humanity, let me assure you,” T’Challa said, edging on acid. “You are not.”   
  
Steve swayed back on his heels. “Your Highness-”   
  
“More often than any of us, your feet have touched ground.  But you resist its gravity.”     
  
T’Challa tilted his head.  He studied Steve with keen eyes, waiting for an answer to a question no one liked to ask, and the  _ why _ of it hung in the air like pollution over the table.  It sat uncomfortably in each chair.  It wore bright shackles.   
  
“We cannot fly on ideals alone and hope for better, it’s time to stop.” T’Challa took Steve’s shoulders in his hands, making him feel like a fifteen year-old hooligan. “You’re not a king, Steven.  You’re not a father.  When was the last time you were truly responsible for a single soul?”   
  
Steve thought of Wanda first.  Not his kid, not even a kid anymore, but he couldn’t imagine a day would come when he wouldn’t think of her as family.  And Sam, for whom he felt more love and responsibility than he did for the Accord and its mission.  Natasha, who needed nothing in the whole damn galaxy that she couldn’t get on her own, needed him, and he couldn’t survive days like this without her.  Peggy would tell him until the day one of them died that he wasn’t responsible for her, to give her proper credit for everything she did, good or bad.  And until one of them died, he’d never believe it.   
  
Steve stood inside T’Challa’s question, held tight in his orbit, and looked across the room to Bucky; an outlying planet that’d wandered back into the light.      
  
No, Steve wasn’t a king or a father.  But he’d collected plenty of souls that fit the narrative.  And for their sake he couldn’t condone what amounted to an occupation.   
  
“Themarun isn’t ours to settle.  It’s a mistake,” he said. “Do you really think we can build anything worth keeping on that kind of foundation?”   
  
T’Challa’s expression hardened.  “Your perspective on colonialism means very little to me.”   
  
His footing so thoroughly dismantled, Steve could only swallow his argument and nod.   
  
“I’m responsible for millions.  Grieving orphans of a thousand shattered cultures look to me for answers,” T’Challa continued. “And I will decide where they can begin again.”   
  
“That sounds familiar,” said Bucky.     
  
He’d been as still as statuary and just as quiet.  At the sound of his voice, everyone swiveled to him in surprise.   
  
T’Challa’s focus shifted, too.  “That. . .brings me to the other matter.”     
  
He walked around Steve to the far end of the table, and sat on its edge.   
  
“Your arm, Mr. Barnes, was another gift from Mr. Stark,” T’Challa began.  “But did you know it was made with vibranium?  Fifteen years ago your life was in the hands of my engineers, good hands, working to rebuild you for something better than retribution.  It’s time you told me exactly what you did with the life we gave you.  After Agent Carter set you free.”   
  
Bucky cut his eyes to Steve, acceptance drawing lines between his brows.  Chin held about as high as could be expected in T’Challa’s presence, Bucky nodded up at him.   
  
“Security will return Mr. Barnes to the  _ Daybreak _ when I’m satisfied with his report,” T’Challa said to Steve.  He held his arm out, gesturing at the office door, effectively dismissing them back to their ship.   
  
Everyone else wisely vacated the office, but Steve stood rigid.  “I’m not leaving without him.”   
  
Bucky’s head dipped.  T’Challa’s lifted.  Somewhere in between, Steve lost the fight.   
  
T’Challa said, “Once we’ve talked, Mr. Barnes will remain in your custody until the representatives meet to decide a course of action.”   
  
  
The office door slid closed behind him, and Steve was once again standing on the command deck, surrounded by his small, stunned crew.  He looked at the back of Bucky’s head through the long picture window.  T’Challa took a seat beside Bucky at the table, and began talking, soundlessly starting a conversation that Steve himself hadn’t managed.   
  
Steve, Nat, Sam and Wanda all stared at the tableau in the window: the last king of humanity and a time traveler in chains.   
  
“Kind of like watching a game show,” Natasha mused.  “Except there’s no right answer, and the prize isn’t a trip to Paris.”   
  
“He isn’t ready for this, Nat.”   
  
She turned to him and said, “No, Rogers,  _ you _ aren’t ready for this.  He’s been waiting for it.”   
  
“Wanting it,” Wanda added cryptically as she swayed closer to the window.   
  
“He has the benefit of being trained by both sides for interrogation,” Sam said.  “So, that’s a feather in his cap.”   
  
T’Challa’s eyes flicked to the four of them standing on the other side of the glass.  He opened his holo-tool and made a quick gesture. The sheer picture window turned opaque, and all Steve could see or hear was the calm chatter of the command deck flight crew, and the hearty, steady hum of the  _ T’Chaka _ .   
  
“Come on.  Let’s go home,” he said.


	10. Afterclaps

As the _Daybreak_ ’s main airlock closed, Steve pushed past Natasha and headed for the cockpit.  
  
Stalking through the kitchen, his mind tunneling toward images of Themarun under invasion, of Bucky in shackles, and the threadbare fleet literally falling out of the sky, Steve did what he always did when backed into a corner full of garbage.  He fought.  
  
Trouble was, nobody was fighting him.  Nobody’d taken him by the scruff and tossed him into an optionless outcome.  He’d done that all on his own.  
  
“Goddamn it!”  Steve kicked something tall and spindly.  Having done nothing but to be the only thing poking out from under the kitchen counter, the stool careened across the floor like a rogue satellite.  It hit a cabinet door, which flew open, and a cup (one of the few items of glassware they still had) fell out and shattered.  
  
The sound of it shook Steve out of his burning haze, and he felt eyes watching him.  He turned to see Sam and Wanda standing in the doorway.  
  
The ship-wide comm system blipped, and ViSN said, “Sir, we’ve received another subspace transmission from Themarun.”  
  
“Tell T’Challa about it,” Steve muttered.  “Or did you already do that?”  
  
A pause followed, allowing Steve to take several deep breaths.  He scrubbed his hands over his face, through his hair, angry at himself for lashing out at a stool and a damn AI.  The latter of which he liked better than most people.  
  
“Mr. Stark’s program was unknown to me until ninety-six hours ago,” ViSN offered, stiffly.  “It contained subroutines designed to restrict me from informing you.”  
  
Sam came up from behind Steve to pat his shoulder.  
  
Steve shook his head.  “You’re right, I’m sorry, Vis.  That wasn’t fair.”  
  
“An apology is unnecessary.”    
  
Wanda knelt to pluck up the pieces of the cup, handling them like eggs that weren’t already broken.  She laid them on the counter, leaned against it, and said, “They wouldn’t just. . .take over someone else’s planet.  Would they?”  
  
“T’Challa is a lot of scary things, but he’s not like the Council,” Natasha replied, entering the kitchen.   She eyed the toppled stool, the broken glass, then Steve, with elevating levels of admonition. “The fleet is one popped string away from hanging up the fiddle.  He doesn’t have a choice.”    
  
“But we do,” Sam said, and looked at Steve.  “Right?”  
  
Optionless outcomes weren’t in Steve’s vocabulary.   Good that someone remembered it.  He ground his jaw.  
  
“I need to talk to Clint as soon as we’re in range.  It’s too late to get out in front of this, but maybe we can still help,” he said.  “Vis, I hate to ask, but-”  
  
“Mr. Stark’s auto-sync program is currently occupied with reviewing a packet of information I have compiled from the Theta quadrant.”  
  
“Theta,” Wanda said, with a huff.  “How big is the packet?”  
  
“Ten-thousand exabytes,” replied ViSN  
  
A pleased grin spread across Sam’s face and he knocked soundly on the kitchen table.  “Well alright then.”  
  
“Proud of you, Vis.  You’ve got some sand after all,” said Steve.  
  
“It appears so, Captain,” said ViSN. “The delay should give us a head start of one sol.”  
  
 _Us._ It never failed to brighten Steve’s outlook when ViSN included himself.  He picked up the stool and sat on it while everyone gathered at the table.  
  
“Alright.  The plan is this,” he said, feeling the warmth of command, of purpose, wash over him like a sunrise.  “Once they deliver Bucky back to the _Daybreak_ we burn the breeze for Themarun and hope to hell we can beat the Accord scouts there.”  
  
Nat folded her hands on the table.  
  
“And once we’re there, we do what?” she said, sincere and baiting all at once.  “Give Clint the heads-up to set half a million extra plates for dinner?  Arm a bunch of civilians with our six antique weapons?  C’mon, Steve, you gotta do better than the right thing.  We need the smart thing.”    
  
He sat up straight, left hand trailing on instinct over the empty spot where his shield generator once sat.  
  
“We hold the line. We put ourselves between innocent people and the storm we brought to their door,” Steve said.  He held Nat’s gaze, saying earnestly, “I don’t think T’Challa would spill blood for land, but we can’t be sure the people on Themarun feel the same.”   
  
Convinced as much by the spectre of violence as by his strategy, Nat nodded.  
  
“What you’re asking is a helluva lot more than patching up comms and building irrigation systems,” said Sam.  “This is real close to what they used to call sedition.”  
  
“It’s more than just insubordination,” offered Wanda.  
  
“I know,” Steve said, and looked them each in the eye.  “So, I won’t take it personally if you’d rather just drop me off alone in a shuttle.”  
  
“That’s not going to happen,” said Sam.  
  
“We all go, or none of us do,” Nat said.  She drew invisible patterns on the table, adding flatly, “Besides, you can’t fly that thing to save your life.”   
  
“Landing is problematic, too,” said Wanda.  
  
“Truth hurts, man.” Sam shook his head at Steve, and then bumped fists with Nat and Wanda.    
  
When they looked up at Steve again he hoped they saw his redness, his thin smirk, for what they were:  The kind of lifelong irritation, the chafe and the instant soothe, that only came from love.  
  
“Thanks,” he said.  “Let’s get to work.”  
  
  
  
Ten minutes away from the execution of their new plan, a ballsy move if ever there was one, Steve walked the corridor of the crew quarters looking for Wanda.  He found her in the room they’d given to Bucky.  
  
“The _T’Chaka_ just hailed us,” said Steve, ducking his head inside. “A shuttle’s headed back with Bucky on it.  Are you ready?”  
  
Wanda said nothing.  When she turned around, Steve saw Bucky’s rucksack hugged to her chest like a stuffed animal.    
  
“Hey, if this isn’t something you want to be a part of, that’s okay,” Steve said, stepping inside.  “Nat’s right.  Going against the brand we ride for isn’t exactly the smart play.”  
  
“But it’s the right one,” said Wanda.  Her hands tightened on the rucksack.  “I’m worried about him.”  
  
Surprised and softened by her concern, Steve said, “Me too.”  
  
“What they’re asking him to talk about.  He doesn’t like it.”  
  
Steve swallowed.  “You said he. . .wanted to be there.”  
  
“There’s a funny line between want and need,” Wanda replied with a dry smile.  “He walks it like a drunk.”  
  
Leaning against the doorframe, Steve glanced around Bucky’s quarters.  The room could’ve been mistaken for unoccupied, other than the unmade bed, a chore Bucky’d only done in the service because _not_ doing it had earned him the unholy wrath of both the Sergeant and their whole unit.  Steve said, “He’ll have talked about the exact thing we’re about to do.”  
  
Wanda tilted her head at him.  Steve smiled.  
  
“Now, it may be a shock to you, knowing me the way you do, but I have a history of disregarding orders that don’t feel right.  But Bucky?  He only did it twice in his life.”  Steve pushed aside the uncomfortable pictures he’d been privy to in Bucky’s mind and focused on the facts as he knew them.  “Freeing Stendauer was the first time, and you saw how he paid for that, you felt it.  The second time was after he got the arm.”  
  
Wanda closed her eyes, quiet, still clutching Bucky’s bag.  She looked to be remembering, reliving things that’d never happened to her.  “They wanted him to fight for them.”  
  
“Yeah, but that wasn’t anything new,” said Steve.  He rubbed his jaw.  “Erskine’s serum gave them plenty of tools to fight with, plenty of men and women like me.  Bucky, Peggy, and I saw that firsthand.  After the refinery, I think he did what he did to stop it from happening all over again.”  
  
She took a swaying step toward Steve.  
  
“In his mind, I saw the _Havok_ , packed with Council crates.”  Wanda almost reached for his arm, but settled on pinning him with those huge eyes instead. “Peggy helped him.”  
  
“That she did,” Steve murmured, recalling with bright clarity how she’d looked in Erskine’s lab.  All the shine of discovery and duty worn dull by reality.  “The science division had the Council’s precious secret minerals locked up tight behind a blockade of Accord battleships.  A lot of people were going to die over some magic rocks, and Peggy saw the truth of it.  Bucky wanted to help.  Neither of them told me what they were planning.”  
  
“Treason,”  Wanda said, nodding.  
  
“Something like that.”  Steve cocked his head at her.   “But I tend to think that word only applies if you intend to hurt your own side.”  
  
“They locked her up, though.”  
  
Steve’s eyes trailed to the ceiling.  For the first time in a long spell, he let himself fantasize about ‘saving’ Peggy.  He could bring Wanda.  Finally punch a hole in the Accord’s idea of justice.  
  
“Bucky went against orders and completed the right mission. _Her_ mission,” he said, voice a little fractured.  “With those rocks onboard, he knew the Council would break off their attacks and follow him instead.  So, he jumped away.”  
  
“Without looking.  No net,”  Wanda said, dreamily.  Her eyes came snapping back to him, and Steve felt deeply, completely _seen_ every time she did that.  “Do you want to know what happened on the other side of that jump?  I can show you.”  
  
“No,” he said, giving her a cautious look, and he eased Bucky’s rucksack from her hands. “But if I change my mind, you’ll be the first to know, won’t you?”  
  
The pack was full, Steve realized, and probably heavy.  The contents felt settled, as if they’d been packed for a while.  
  
“We’re crossing a line,” Wanda said.  “I am not sure we can find our way back.”  
  
Even with their history, the infinite black territory they’d already charted in their searching, Steve had the same fear.  All the maps for navigating their current situation had holes big enough to fall through.  
  
With slow fingers, Steve opened Bucky’s rucksack.  Inside were packed all the necessities of flight over fight:  meal pouches, comms, clothes, a tablet.  He’d even squirreled away a bag of fruit that’d come in the crate from Themarun.  The evidence of hypervigilance, of escape, made the rucksack heavier than it looked.  
  
Steve blinked.  The only surprising thing about it was the total lack of weaponry.   
  
“Sir, Mr. Barnes’ transport is preparing to dock at the main airlock,” said ViSN, the ship-wide comm breaking the silence.  Steve nodded, mostly to himself, still holding the bag and wondering if Bucky had ever returned in the first place.  
  
“Maybe we can’t come back from this.”  He closed the pack and handed it to Wanda. “But I’d rather go out knowing I tried.”


	11. Bend an Elbow

The  _ Daybreak _ wasn’t so big that a person could hide for long, but Bucky managed to evade everyone whenever he wanted to.  Even Natasha, who could find an earring in a stack of grenade pins, couldn’t rustle Bucky from hiding when he didn’t want to be found.   
  
And there were plenty of good reasons for Bucky to steal off to empty spaces, away from sad or suspicious eyes.  While T’Challa and the Accord leaders stewed over Bucky’s testimony and plotted an occupation of Themarun, the  _ Daybreak _ was racing toward treason.  And Bucky hadn’t been invited to that meeting.  So, it wasn’t a surprise that he practiced some truly spectacular avoidance.  Steve understood the instinct.     
  
But it was damn tiresome to still be searching for a man he’d already found.   
  
The last place he looked, because it was the last place he expected to find Bucky, was Sam’s room.   
  
The door slid open and there they were, tucked in the low light, lounging in the two overstuffed leather chairs, a bottle of Reverent whiskey half-finished on the little table between them.  Bluesy music from a four-hundred year-old recording streamed gently from Sam’s wall terminal.   
  
“Uh.” Steve stood in the doorway, vaguely aware that the door wanted to close on him, but stepping into the tableau seemed like an intrusion.  Sam’s eyes twinkled, and Bucky looked. . .almost relaxed.  “I, uh.  We’re a couple of hours from Themarun, and we’ll be in comm range soon.”   
  
“Barnes here was just telling me about the last time he had a drink,” said Sam, pouring himself another. “After I found him breaking into my stash.”   
  
“Yeah?”  Steve tipped his head at Bucky and stepped inside, letting the door finish its job.   
  
“After we hit the Corduroy Road on Trippak.  I forgot until I tasted it again,” Bucky said.  He turned his glass this way and that. “Me and Peg had a laugh, didn’t we? Watching you try to tie one on and getting nowhere.  The last supersoldier, the best of the best, couldn’t even get drunk.”   
  
When Bucky looked up at him, Steve could swear he smelled smoke.     
  
_ The Corduroy Road. _  They’d never seen so many trees, never seen a real forest, never seen so many things made of wood.  And they’d never seen so much fire, eating everything up like a living storm.   
  
He reached down to take Bucky’s whiskey.   
  
“No, no, it’s good, Steve-o,” Bucky murmured, holding the glass tight to his chest. “Now I know how you felt.  How it didn’t feel like anything when you needed it to scratch.”   
  
“I still can’t believe enhancements became standard op during the war,” Sam mused. “Until they ran out.”   
  
“They didn’t run out,” Bucky corrected, eyes drifting upward somewhere over Steve’s chest.   
  
Steve sighed through his nose, jaw jumping.    
  
“Well, I’m not convinced you guys got the better deal,” said Sam, gulping the amber remnants from his glass.   
  
“You never. . .?”  Bucky sat forward suddenly. “You’re not like us?”   
  
“Sam was a colony kid, like Wanda,” Steve said.   
  
When Bucky’s eyebrows pinched in confusion, Sam explained. “I’m from Aeris.  We got into the war late.  And nobody passed the bottle of super juice our way.”   
  
Bucky’s face changed.  New information, new light.  He looked at Sam with a spark of something Steve hadn’t seen since they’d discovered the agriculture rings on the  _ Alexandria _ .  Bucky’d licked his mouth, mind blown, gawping at something new and special because ‘new and special’ just never happened.  Then they’d sprinted through the curving fields of green and yellow with security guards hollering behind them.    
  
So Steve warmed, seeing that look on Bucky’s face again, directed at Sam.     
  
He heard himself say, “Sam’s special like that.”     
  
Slowly, as if taking his eyes off Sam was like turning away from a newfound galaxy, Bucky nodded.  “So he keeps saying.”   
  
Sam frowned at him.  “You didn’t have to suck down half my bottle of Reverent to figure that out.”   
  
The room went quiet except for the soft music, Bucky hugging a glass of something doing nothing, and Steve waiting for him to remember the reason he’d come to Sam’s room.  Maybe he’d learned to be alone as the Soldier, but Steve wasn’t convinced he’d completely forgotten how  _ not _ to be.   
  
Bucky eased back in the leather chair.   
  
“He had me lay it out for him, T’Challa, so he could get the picture.  It was  _ yesterday _ , you know?” he said, turning his glass slowly on his chest.  “I just want to stop. . . _ seeing _ things.”     
  
Bucky downed his finger of whiskey and pushed his glass across the table where it clinked against the bottle. “Turns out I can’t drink myself blind.”   
  
“I don’t know how else to explain it to Sad Ninja here,” Sam said to Steve. “We’re past all this, we’re long since done watching the worst thing happen right before it becomes the second-worst thing.”    
  
“Soldiers have a code, Sam, you know that.  It makes things simpler, orders easier to follow,” said Steve, though it was all the ones he hadn’t followed that came to mind.  He leaned against Sam’s desk and searched the ceiling for a better way to shape an explanation for Bucky being all abroad in the new world.  “To do what we did, to fight, we needed that code.  War makes everything expensive, including doubt.”   
  
When Steve’s eyes fell back to the two men and the half empty bottle, Sam was shaking his head at Bucky.     
  
“Look, where we’re from and where we’re going won’t ever be the same place again, none of us gets to circle back,” said Sam.   
  
War manufactured certainty as efficiently as it did rounds of ammo.  But, Steve knew Sam had always been a good civilian, a real natural at creating his own reasons to keep going when there were no more orders.    
  
Bucky hung his head,  _ And now? _ etched deep in the curve of his neck.  Sam watched him for long minute, so intensely that Steve felt invisible.  Scooting to the edge of his seat, Sam spoke to Bucky’s bowed head evenly, softly;  a friend comforting the aggrieved.   
  
“War isn’t your mantra anymore, Barnes.  Not if you don’t want it to be.  Do like I did, hang it up on the wall like the world’s shittiest trophy and watch it collect dust.”     
  
Bucky was silent.  The song filtering lazily out of the terminal stopped, and there was a pause before the next one kicked on.     
  
When Bucky raised his head to Sam, Steve saw that stargazing look again. The two of them forgot to be at odds for a second and saw, instead, someone real to tie-to.  It was a subsurface kind of understanding that made Steve ache for its rarity.   
  
It also, apparently, made him hot.  Without meaning to, he pictured Bucky and Sam together, naked.   
  
“Why do you have such a big room, anyway?”  Bucky’s voice broke the skin of Steve’s daydream.    
  
“Captain’s quarters.  Steve didn’t want ‘em, so we switched.” Sam palmed the bottle of whiskey and sat back with it.  “You station brats have a hardon for cramped spaces.”   
  
Mouth open, eyes dark, Bucky looked across the room at Steve as if he was the last can of genuine Coke in the whole galaxy.  And just out of reach. “Seems so,” he said, and swallowed.   
  
Sam rubbed his face.  “Oookay, I’m not up for this nonsense.”    
  
“Huh?”  Bucky swiveled to him, and Sam gestured with the bottle.   
  
“This.  The three of us.  Being coy about it isn’t my style,” Sam insisted, whiskey sloshing.  “I told him and I’m telling you, since you stopped staring at the floor for minute, and we’re being friendly.  I like a little space, yeah, but I don’t cut and run when things get . . .crowded.”   
  
Steve watched Bucky’s lashes dip and stay down.     
  
“Barnes?”    
  
“Yeah,” Bucky said, still looking at nothing in particular.  Steve’s heart jammed flat against his ribs.  He came off the edge of the desk and dropped down beside Bucky’s chair.   
  
“Me and Sam, that’s not going to change.  And he’s saying it doesn’t have to. . .it doesn’t mean the end of you and me, not if you still want to keep it together.”  Steve wiped his mouth, looking for a little hope in how the words hit Bucky.  He was fucking it up, maybe, by laying it out like this, but being plain was all they had time for.  “It’s your play, Buck.  You gotta let us know which way you’re going to jump.”   
  
Bucky’s eyes traveled a crooked mile from Steve to the table to the bottle in Sam’s lap.   
  
“Crowded, huh?  I can do that,” he said to Sam, who suddenly looked like a man trapped in his own plan.  Bucky smirked. “We did it before.”   
  
“Yeah, I heard a little about that,” Sam said.  When Bucky chuckled, Steve couldn’t call it happy or sad.     
  
“Worked pretty well, as I recall,” Steve said, and added quickly, “It wouldn’t have to be like it was with . . .”   
  
“Peggy,” Bucky finished, blinking at Steve. “It’s funny.  You only say her name in your sleep.”   
  
Steve felt backhanded, roughed up and left with blood in his mouth.     
  
But this wasn’t the Soldier, not some living weapon with a precision scope.  This was bone-deep Bucky, and he slid out of his chair so quick that no one had time to decipher the intent, some kind of decision making room in his body.     
  
He slipped the bottle from Sam’s fingers, pulled deep from it, throat bobbing, and dropped it on the carpet by Steve.  Then, he knelt and urged Sam forward, handling his confused face like it was someone’s prized china.     
  
“Whoa. Um. Bucky?”  Steve got to his feet and his mouth went tangy.     
  
“Just being friendly,” Bucky whispered, nosing Sam’s cheek.  “Okay?”    
  
Eyes open, darting to Steve before resettling on the immediate need coming off Bucky, Sam nodded.  “What the hell,” he said, and licked his lips.    
  
Bucky closed the deal they’d put in front of him.    
  
His opening salvo was a light kiss, a wide shot, letting Sam know where he was, what he was capable of.  And to Steve’s conflicted gratification, Sam fired back by deepening the kiss solicitously, pushing in, cupping Bucky’s head and scooting forward in the chair.  Sam held him like that, tonguing out the essential Bucky, the heady, grief-heavy man trapped between his knees, but also the unsalted soldier with the sly boy charm.     
  
Steve flushed, right down to his belly, and breath neglected to fill up his chest.   
  
Not wanting to miss a second of it was the only thing keeping him stock-still.  Sam’s hands disappeared in Bucky’s hair.  Bucky’s metal arm circled Sam’s back.  The wet sound of them, half smack and half moan, the friction of fabric and skin, altogether it made a soft ruckus in the room, overtaking the jazzy fog of music.  Or maybe it was Steve’s mind, gone pliant and gushy with the sight as much as the possibility;  Not having to spend another night alone, apart, weighing repercussions, keeping the census down until they were raw from it.   
  
“S-Steve?”   
  
Steve blinked, minimally aware that he was being addressed.    
  
Head tilted back, with Bucky’s mouth slicking a path down his neck, Sam looked up at Steve and said, “You okay, man?”   
  
“People keep asking me that.” Steve swallowed.  O _ kay _ was a target they’d obliterated.  “I’m good.  And, uh, you?”   
  
Before Sam could answer (if he truly could with Bucky’s hands all over him), Bucky went for his belt.  Sam’s zipper was halfway to the promised land, Bucky’s right hand palming the front of his briefs, when Sam’s head caught up with the action.   
  
“Oh, shit.  Shit.” He gripped Bucky’s wrist and said calmly, “Hey, hey.  That doesn’t have to be the deal. You don’t have to.”   
  
There wasn’t a soft dick in the room, not a single muscle or patch of nerves between the three of them that didn’t want what Bucky was offering.  But, old flame or new,  _ making damn sure _ was the better part of whatever they were about to do.   
  
Bucky sat back on his heels, panting, flushed.  He shook the hair out of his face.   
  
“I kinda do. Like you wouldn’t believe,” he said, drawing two pairs of eyes down to where he thumbed the bulge in his pants.  _ Can’t drink myself blind _ .  He lifted his chin toward Steve and asked Sam, “He tell you what it was like with us?”   
  
Sam pulled a face.  “This may come as a shock, but we had other things to talk about besides you.”   
  
“Well, if you were ever curious. . .”  Bucky lifted onto his knees again, coaxed Sam into a kiss again, and laid his hands in Sam’s. “Put ‘em where you want, or tell me to hit the bricks.”   
  
“Fuck,” Sam sighed, and looked to Steve, who couldn’t have agreed more.    
  
“Your pants, your call,” said Steve, unhelpfully.    
  
“You know what, Rogers.” Sam shook his head at Steve and looked down at Bucky’s hands in his own, and at the man himself who seemed to court a challenge without even trying.    
  
Taking Bucky’s right hand, Sam pressed the curve of his palm against the curve in his briefs, and said, “Go on, then.”   
  
A slip of a victory smile, so faint yet so full, spread across Bucky’s mouth.  Wide-eyed, drinking in Sam’s moans of approval, Bucky worked him through the thin cloth, and Steve whispered, “H-hell,” like it was his born name.   
  
Bucky wasted none of his momentum.  He had Sam hard and full in his mouth in seconds, and Steve swayed toward the chair.  When he did, Sam grabbed his hand, seeming to need the support.  Steve needed it more, he was hot enough to hump the hull, and stiff enough to dent it trying.   
  
“Go slow.  Barnes, goddamn it, it’s not your last meal,” Sam said, groaning then hissing through his teeth.  “I plan on keeping that when you’re done with it.”   
  
Easing his mouth off Sam, Bucky said, “You talk as much as he does.”  Then, thoughtfully, with a hand still stroking, he looked at Steve. “Did?”   
  
“Still do,” Steve said, nodding along with Sam. “But, I’m coming up empty just now.”   
  
“Not me,” said Sam, biting his lip as Bucky went back to it, wetter and louder than before.     
  
Sam brushed Bucky’s hair back, gathered and held it aside so Steve could see.  For his part, Steve would’ve gotten on his own knees and joined, or even just prayed to it, if he wasn’t worried he’d snuff the spark that’d compelled Bucky to turn Sam inside out in the first place.    
  
“Barnes.  Jesus-fuck.”  Sam was ragged under Bucky’s pace, knees drawn wide, Bucky giving him no quarter, and Steve almost felt bad for him.     
  
Sam’s hips jumped under Bucky’s jaw and he came with a groan, sounding sore about it being that good.  Steve could’ve told him, but Sam had been right.  They’d never talked about it.     
  
Bucky turned and spat into his empty whiskey glass.    
  
Just the sight, the simple baseness of it, twanged something in Steve, squeezed him from the inside, had him reaching for Bucky, hauling him to his feet, before he knew what he was doing.  There was a heavy grunt, a clash of breath, and Steve went diving for whatever was left of Sam in Bucky’s mouth.     
  
“Really?” Sam said, breathless, dubious, and a little awed in Steve’s periphery.   
  
It was all Steve could think of to want just then, when the buffet on the table was too much to even consider, just to kiss the tang out of him, find the place where Sam mixed with Bucky and lick it clean.  He’d forgotten how dirtysweet it was, how much he missed sharing that kind of knowledge, the analog telepathy about all things  _ body _ .  Steve wanted to memorize it all.  So he kept Bucky tight against him until the kiss ran dry, and Bucky wrenched his mouth away.   
  
“Gotta breathe sometime, punk,” Bucky huffed against his lips.  His eyes were lost, though.  They drifted, heavy, foggy with a whole lot of need and not enough direction.  Then, Bucky moved.   
  
He snaked an arm around Steve’s waist, widened his stance a fraction, and let his hips and the shape of his dick rub the shine off the last of Steve’s hollering nerves.  Riding the rhythm, Steve tried again to find Bucky’s eyes.  But the friction was a mismatched distraction, the kind of dumb humping kids did when they couldn’t figure out the rest.   
  
“I wanted to so bad, Buck,”  Steve mumbled. “Why didn’t we. . .”   
  
Sam came out of his chair, scrubbed his face and shook his head.  “Because you’re both hopeless,” he said, reaching for Steve’s belt.   
  
Once Steve’s pants were open, cool air hitting skin was already damp, Sam turned to Bucky, only to be pulled up short by firm hand on his wrist.   
  
“Wilson, you don’t have to.”   
  
“You’ll never catch me doing anything I don’t want to,” said Sam.   
  
There was a nod, Bucky’s hair falling in his face as he watched, and Sam eased their dicks out.   
  
Steve hadn’t daydreamed this far ahead, hadn’t even sketched it.  It was all he could do to hold on, to catch the right angle, while Sam stroked them both.  It was a tight circle, too many broad shoulders slumping down into heavy arms, working toward an end, but Sam managed.  He was smooth as he could be, but Steve grunted, impatient for the rougher hand that was more familiar between them, and he forgot to warn Bucky.    
  
“Christ!” Bucky hissed, flinched, then pushed for more. “Is this. . .ah, f-fuck, is this payback?”   
  
“I’m not a lefty, deal with it.” Sam’s lips ghosted Bucky’s neck. “At least it’s not metal.”   
  
“Sam.”  Steve’s tongue lost the shape of anything beyond that. “Sam, Sa-”   
  
“Yeah I know,” Sam murmured, and leaned in to kiss him.  “All that super-dick and you’re still a quick sonofabitch.”   
  
Bucky laughed, surprising both of them.     
  
“God, he really is,” he said, still chuckling, gripping Steve’s hip under Sam’s elbow and thrusting into Sam’s grip.    
  
Bucky’s head dropped to Steve’s shoulder and he kept on shaking with laughter, with desire.  He even managed some competitive eye-contact with Sam, who gave it right back while he stroked them both.  It pitched Steve right over the edge.  He came too quick, maybe, but he’d be damned if he’d let anyone blame him.   
  
Bucky went all shuddery and stiff, right after Steve, but as he leaned into it there was a rapid knock at Sam’s door, the sudden sound crashing through their haze, and the control panel lit up as the door prepared to open.     
  
“Shit!” Sam hissed.   
  
Steve twisted backwards, hit the wall, and slapped his hand over the Hold button. Natasha’s voice grumbled on the other side.   
  
“Uh. . .heads up, fellas,” she said, muffled but serious. “We’re being hailed.”   
  
Steve sketched a look at Sam and Bucky, who were coming back to themselves from under the thick fog of sex.  Squeezing his eyes shut, Steve scrambled to remember what they’d been doing right before this.  Stomach tweaking, he said, “Clint?”   
  
Nat paused. “It’s bad.”   



	12. Cat's-paw

Breaking Themarun’s petal-pink shell of atmo, the shuttle’s hull shuddered, and for a moment the windows went blinding white.  Then, they cleared the higher cloud banks and saw a rugged patchwork of interconnected canyons spread out below.  Steve bore the shuttle downward, fixed on a city they couldn’t yet see.  And though their rogue mission loomed front and center in his mind, Steve had to admit that flying down over this particular landscape felt, for the first time in a long while, like coming home.   
  
“Nat, give me a reading.  You’re my eye in the sky.”   
  
Over the comm, surveilling from orbit in the  _ Daybreak _ , Natasha had their ultimate six.   
  
“The fighting’s mainly in the valley above the city.  About sixty targets moving south along the river through the scattered farms,” she reported.  “And there’s a cluster of energy weapon signatures in the village near the river’s end.”   
  
“I’m, uh, really sorry to drag you back here for this,” offered Clint, sounding tinny and breathless from the speaker in the helm.  Nat had joined his comm with the shuttle’s, but his voice stuttered in and out.  Between the atmospheric static, and what sounded like weapon fire, Steve had a hard time keeping Clint’s signal clear.   
  
Then, ViSN piped up from the  _ Daybreak. _   
  
“Accord scouts have also arrived, sir,” said ViSN.  “On your same heading.”   
  
“Great.”  Steve checked over his shoulder, but saw nothing through either of the shuttle’s side windows.  His eyes fell on Sam and Wanda, strapped into the shuttle jumpseats.   
  
“Technically, we still beat them here,” Sam said grimly.   
  
Steve turned back to the helm controls.  “Clint, what’s your status?”     
  
A screech broke across the comm, and sensors showed three vessels breaking atmo behind them, all with Accord signatures.   
  
Over the comm, between electrical blasts, Clint tried to explain.   
  
“So, the situation is this: The river clans got wind of your visit.  They banded together with a few paranoid types from the northern townships,” he said, huffing in consternation, “which is weird because they don’t even like-”   
  
“Clint,” Steve urged.   
  
“Some things are on fire,” Clint replied. “My things, mostly.”   
  
“Shit,” Steve said. “Hold on, we’re five minutes out.”   
  
He rocketed the shuttle steeply downward, not quite a nosedive but close enough that the angle had Wanda and Sam clutching their harnesses.  As they entered a canyon, Steve pulled back on the throttle and the shuttle gave another bone-deep whine.  Sailing through the gorge, he angled toward a spot where it met a larger canyon at a T-shaped juncture.   
  
“What’s your location?”  Steve barked, scanning the plateau just ahead.  But Clint’s end of the comm went dead.  “Clint, come in!”   
  
Natasha’s tense voice filled the shuttle.  “His comm signal was north of the village before I lost it.”   
  
The shuttle reached the T-junction of the two canyons.  There, from the floor of the gorge all the way up to the top of the plateau where the river plummeted over the cliff, was an entire city carved right into the canyon wall.  A vertical stone hive of homes and public spaces emerged from the rock face, both natural and intricately designed.  The city’s buildings were butter yellow striated with rust red, everything connected by a network of bridged pathways that arced gracefully through the architecture and around the waterfall, accented by trees and flowering vines that clung to the stone.     
  
With their unofficial escort of Accord scouts gaining speed behind them, Steve steered the shuttle sharply up and over the city, following the river that spilled out above it.  From there, he spotted the first signs of conflict: Energy weapon blasts, blue and green, streaking through the riverside village, roughly ten miles south of where they’d set up Clint’s irrigation system.  Weapon fire zinged and sizzled along the valley and, further up, plumes of smoke rose from the outlying farms.     
  
“Invaders?” said Wanda.   
  
“Militants.” Steve ground his jaw.  “They’re working their way into the city from above.”   
  
“Less resistance, and they can pick up supplies along the way,” Sam said.  “I guess not everyone was happy about our visit.”

  
“Yeah, you could say that.” Clint’s comm burst from the helm’s speakers, clearer than before.  Steve located his signal.  He was close, near the village, where fighting was thickest. “They got word of your fleet a few days ago and figured since I was your contact that we were plotting some kind of invasion together.  Tumbleheads.”   
  
Wanda leaned forward in her jumpseat. “Casualties?”   
  
“Some livestock, a few injuries, but so far no one’s dead,” Clint replied, while the increasing sound of his bow shots hummed that things could change real quick.   
  
“This is exactly what we were trying to avoid,” Steve muttered.  He swallowed hard, stomach lurching.  At the grass-choked riverbank, a broken line of terrified villagers fled downriver, like pale violet ants, toward the safety of the canyon city.   
  
“I mean, I like you, but I was never really the one to talk to,” said Clint over the comm, panting heavily as he paused. “I don’t speak for my people.”   
  
Before Steve could answer, the shuttle gave a hard, threatening dip under sudden turbulence, and third voice entered the conversation.   
  
“Thankfully, I speak for mine,” said T’Challa.     
  
“ _ Your Highness? _ ”  Heart thudding, Steve craned around to the starboard windows.   
  
A shadow darkened the cabin, and Steve struggled to keep the shuttle steady.  The broad, manta ray shape of a Dora Milaje fighter moved across the bow.  It boomed ahead to the river valley, turned about sharply, and set down among the purple grasses that flattened in its wake.   
  
Steve turned to his crew.  Head shaking ruefully, Sam pulled on his gloves, while Wanda sat ramrod straight.  She fiddled with her grav baton, a tool they mostly used to move heavy cargo these days, then slipped it into her belt.  Except for the shuttle’s landing thrusters and the distant sound of fighting, it was quiet.   
  
The comm hissed.   
  
“You guys have royalty?” said Clint.

  
  
T’Challa’s ship set down precisely where Steve had intended to land, between the escaping villagers and the militants.  The Accord scout ships split off.  Two moved forward of the village, effectively cutting it off from any militants still moving down the valley, and the third hung back at the entrance to the city.   
  
Steve plonked his shuttle on the bank opposite the Dora Milaje fighter, landing hard enough to rattle bones.  The rear hatch hissed open.   
  
“Hope it’s not as bad as it sounds out there,” said Sam, powering up the Redwing drone.  Wanda eyed his pack, at the spot where a set of hard-light wings would soon emerge.   
  
“Stay high,” she said.   
  
Sam cut his eyes to Steve, then gave Wanda a wink.  “Only if you stay low.”   
  
From the shuttle’s open door, they could just see the edge of the chaos.  Fifty feet away, a haze of yellow dust covered most of the village, and from it straggled groups of shocked faces, running stiff-kneed downriver toward the shuttle.  They were like Clint, vaguely reptilian, with large black eyes, bodies in shades of violet and buff, draped in loose desert garb.   
  
There were plenty of kids, Steve saw, and elderly, pushing slowly down the reedy bank.   They could only cower as bursts of energy fire zinged behind them, lancing through the dust and grass-topped houses in a menacing blue-green lightshow.   
  
“Priority is protecting the villagers,” Steve said, keeping a weather eye on T’Challa’s ship, which had yet to open.  “Wanda, keep them calm and keep them moving.”   
  
She nodded, striding out into the haze where swirling drafts plucked at her hair and jacket.  At a radius of thirty feet or so, she could touch their minds, give them direction.  And if the hostiles got past Steve and Sam. . .well, that’s what the grav baton was for.   
  
“Sam, get to that ridge.”  Steve pointed the blade of his hand at a rocky arch, a natural bridge jutting out toward the village from the valley’s rightmost palisade. “Funnel the militants to me, or turn them back the way they came.”   
  
“On it.”  Sam’s jetpack fired as twenty feet of hard-light wingspan unfolded from his back.  Steve turned to the village while Sam soared toward higher ground.   
  
As he eased into a steady trot toward the nearest building, Steve pulsed the shield generator on his bracer with a single clench of his fist.  The vibranium shield spiraled out of nothing, an old weight ready for a new fight.  A villager in deep red robes, shuffling past Steve, startled at the sight and sound of the crisp metal snapping into shape.  He tried to smile at her, but she booked it in the opposite direction.     
  
“Nat, what’s the count?”   
  
“Hard to say,” she replied, and Steve couldn’t tell if she’d sighed or if the channel had gone fuzzy. “Two dozen in the village, give or take.  Not sure what happened to the targets from the outlying farms.”   
  
“I, uh, went ahead and took care of that,” said Clint over the comm.     
  
“That’s quite the hit-count, for a farmer,” Sam said warmly, lighting on the rocky archway.  “Good to see you, buddy.”   
  
Relieved, Steve followed Sam’s eyeline and scanned the village for signs of Clint.  As he came around the first cluster of huts, an oblong open-air pavilion emerged from the shifting dust.  Perched on top of its crenelated roof was a vest-clad figure darting from end to end, firing arrows at inhuman speed.    
  
Clint had cover, at least, and from the center of the village he could call targets.     
  
Rough voices echoed between two buildings to Steve’s two o’clock.  Nerves sputtered in his chest.   This should’ve been the easy part.  Clearing corners, saving lives, making room for peace at a busted table.  This was the best of what he’d been made for, so it should’ve fit back into place like boots well-laced, like his shield.  But as he pushed up, toward the sound of angry shouting, Steve couldn’t shake a creeping doubt; His age and his rustiness, maybe, or his insubordination, jangling his confidence.     
  
A pair of young villagers sprinted past him, and Steve stepped into the path behind them, shield raised against whoever was chasing them.   
  
“I’ll stick to the village, give the people time to run.  And guys. . .” he murmured over the comm.  “They’re not our enemies.  Don’t put anyone down that you don’t have to.”   
  
The rough voices turned garbled, startled, then quiet.      
  
“Agreed.”  From between the buildings stepped T’Challa, in full Panther armor.     
  
Steve exhaled, surprised as much by his readiness for T’Challa’s help as by the stark, inky shape of him appearing out of the dust.   
  
“Forgot how much you like to make an entrance,” Steve said, wry smile tugging at his mouth.  Nine words, and he’d still failed to sound as sorry as he was supposed to be.  “Your Highness.”   
  
Over the comm, Clint snorted. “That’s gonna take some getting used to.”   
  
“Captain Rogers,” T’Challa said.  He moved to Steve with his stunner blades glowing bright lavender in each hand.  “There will be a conversation about your actions, make no mistake.  But now is not the time.”   
  
It’d take a dozen more years, Steve thought, and a lot more bad blood, before he’d stop being impressed by the man.  He cleared his throat and tried to imagine what that’d be like.     
  
“Never thought I’d see that suit again.”   
  
“Nor I your shield.”   
  
Across the film of dust, they smiled at each other.  At least, Steve hoped that was a smile under T’Challa’s mask.  It was the only thing they had left to share.  Except the fight.   
  
“Well, let’s shake the dust off,” Steve said.   
  
T’Challa nodded, pulled his mask into place, and together they sprinted toward the rising echo of shouting and gunfire.  Steve kept pace, his knees matching T’Challa’s strides as they darted and hurtled through the village.  But once he dove into the tight cluster of homes beyond the market pavilion, Steve lost sight of the stealthy black armor.     
  
He could, however, see the lilac tracery of T’Challa’s stunner blades as they cut across the hazy pathway between buildings.  Pained groans issued from wherever the projectiles found their marks.  Over their shared comm channel, Steve heard T’Challa issuing orders for the Accord troops to move north from their position.   
  
“Engage only to pacify,” T’Challa said.     
  
Steve marveled at the ease of his voice in battle, long after what should’ve been his retirement.    
  
To his left, a man dressed in greenish leathers stalked out from between two adobe houses.  He spotted Steve, raised a staff-like weapon, and fired.  Steve’s shield took the brunt of the force, heavy vibrations thrumming into his arm as the shot dispersed in a blue haze.  Barrelling forward, shield tilted, Steve knocked the man flat with a ringing thump to the head.  He checked to see the hostile was still sucking air, then pushed forward.   
  
Other than their clothing, the armed figures moving from house to house were like Clint and his people.  But some were taller, broader, with birdlike features.  They sported long powerful legs and three-fingered hands ending in talons.  One of them emerged from the low doorway of a hut, shouldering whatever he’d looted.  But his attention was drawn to the sudden appearance of the Redwing, hovering above the hut with its tiny gas missiles poised.  It gave Steve all the opening he needed.     
  
He skirted behind the bird man, and planted his boot hard into a bulging knee-joint.  Bird man shouted and wheeled, the stolen goods flopping to the ground, and Steve lunged backward to avoid getting his nose clawed off.  He grabbed the bird man’s arm, twisted, and thumped him soundly against the doorframe.  With a sickening crack of his forehead, he went out like a light, and Steve tossed the bag of loot back into the recesses of the hut.     
  
From the high stone bridge came a rapid brrappa-bap from Sam’s semi-auto, followed distantly by sleeper rounds thudding home in several bodies.   
  
Jogging toward the north end of the village, Steve cast his eyes around for the next target, and saw a corona of electricity enveloping a whole house.  Pulse grenade.  No telling if anyone was trapped inside.  And the choking yellow dust made it hard to see how many villagers still remained.     
  
“Wanda, how’re we looking?”     
  
“Dirty.”  Over the comm she sounded winded, annoyed, but in control.  “The elders here say there are still a few unaccounted for.  A family, I think.  These people are difficult to read.”     
  
Checking behind him, above the dust and the grassy, domed rooftops, Steve could still see the twanging light from Clint’s bow.  And as if sensing friendly eyes on him, Clint turned on his perch and waved.  Then he nocked and fired two arrows in a split formation to either side of Steve.  Spinning, Steve saw a pair of hostiles rolling in the dirt, clutching legs that’d sprouted a couple of painful new accessories.  Clint nodded and went back to firing toward the opposite side of the village.   
  
Steve angled toward where he’d seen the pulse grenade. “Sam?”   
  
“Move to your three.  I sent you guys something special.”   
  
Making tight right turn between a building and a corral of some kind, Steve wound up on the wide central road that split the village roughly in two.  There, he found T’Challa, bright claws and brighter blades at the ready, braced for confrontation with three assailants.     
  
And two from behind that he hadn’t yet spotted.     
  
T’Challa’s stunners blasted through the militants spread out before him.  One of the advancing men, a stubby little reptile guy with an old scar that stretched from shoulder to belly across his shirtless chest, took a whistling purple blast to his forehead.  Which made him drop his own pulse grenade.  He and his comrades went down together, sizzling, useless as fish flopping on a beach.  But the two moving up behind T’Challa were almost on top of him.     
  
Steve released the mag lock on his bracer and hurled his shield.  But while T’Challa had made quick work of all his targets, Steve only managed to hit one of his.  He grimaced. The second hostile, another bird man, had dropped to a crouch, and narrowly avoided a thorough braining from the shield.  He abandoned his fixation on T’Challa to round on Steve as the shield arced back into his grip.   
  
Christ, he was a big one, too.   
  
“Alright, take it easy,” Steve warned, left hand spread out in front of him.  A second later, the bird man released a piercing, ululating scream, and charged him. “Or don’t.”   
  
Steve knelt, thighs braced, and pulsed the shield generator twice.  The shield grew in diameter, just in time for bird man’s considerable weight to thunder down on it.  Talons screeched across metal.  Steve grunted and dug in.  With a powerful push, grounded from feet to legs to torso, Steve launched the man up and over.   
  
He didn’t fly far, though.  Steve peeked over the rim of the shield to see T’Challa careening overhead, landing a kick to the man’s torso.  A hundredth of a second later one of Clint’s arrows caught the bird man’s shoulder in mid-air.  He wheezed heavily as the arrow jolted him backward, pinning him to a nearby wall.   
  
Steve stretched his back. “Thanks,” he said, nodding to them both.   
  
“Any time,” Clint replied, ducking down again behind cover.   
  
Silent behind his mask, T’Challa surveyed the scattered bodies in the street.  They coughed brokenly into the dirt.   
  
In the brief quiet, Steve scanned the village, or what he could see of it on either side of the road. It’d gone still from their position all the way back to the landing site.  But, the sounds of scuffling and electricity tumbled together among the houses at the north end.   
  
“Nat, give me some good news.  How many are left?” Steve said.    
  
The  _ Daybreak _ ’s comm channel was silent.  The whole village felt like the eye of a storm, eerie and muffled and due for a punch of chaos.  With the weapons fire dying down, Steve could hear gusts of wind, Redwing whirring off somewhere to the left of the road, and T’Challa’s steady breathing beside him.  But Nat didn’t answer.  Steve’s stomach gnawed itself into a hard pit. “Natasha, come in.”   
  
“We must find the remaining villagers,” said T’Challa, impatient.  He turned toward the high stone arch. “Mr. Wilson?”   
  
Sam dropped from his high stone perch and sailed down across the far end of the village.  His wings made a series of whorls in the veil of dust as he pulled up.   
  
“Redwing marks five friendlies,” Sam said, holding steady above a house just beyond Clint’s position at the center market. “Four in a house.  And a child in a. . .chicken coop?  Wait, those aren’t chickens.”   
  
“Gorbis,” Clint corrected.  His violet head popped up from behind cover, he motioned Steve and T’Challa toward the broad house below Sam’s holding pattern.   
  
They ran for it, T’Challa breaking ahead of Steve to veer to the right of the property.     
  
“I’ve got eyes on the kid,” said Clint. “He’s coming to you, Cap.”   
  
“He’s not the only one,” Sam muttered into the comm.  Above them, his jetpack roared as he flew upward, spinning to dodge a stream weapons fire from north of the house.  Retreating back to his original position on the stone arch, Sam barked,  “A dozen hostiles, incoming.”   
  
“I suspect there will be more than that,” replied T’Challa.  He caught Steve’s eye from across the homestead’s field of burn-tattered grain.  “I’ve lost contact with my scouts guarding the north.”   
  
Three of Clint’s arrows sheared the air.  Charging toward the field, Steve spotted his targets.  Twelve mismatched men with hand weapons and grenades entered the field beyond the low, uneven reed fence that surrounded the property.   
  
“Ten o’clock, Your Highness!”   
  
T’Challa’s swift, black form went low and disappeared, barely disturbing the crop as he went.   
  
The targets broke into three groups, spreading out in different directions. Steve was so focused on them that he almost missed the slight figure of the kid, busting through the grain, racing straight toward him.   
  
As the central group of militants closed in, staff weapons poised, the kid leapt the fence and came flying into Steve’s chest.  Steve caught him on instinct, like a screaming purple football, crowding his body around the kid’s jumble of skinny arms and legs.  He dropped down and pulsed the shield as large as it would go.  They huddled together, low and tight, as a volley of blasts thwanged off the vibranium.  In Steve’s arms, the kid wailed, cheeks wet and dirty below his black eyes.    
  
“It’s gonna be okay,” Steve whispered, though he was pretty sure the kid could call bullshit from an adult in any language.  But he stayed perfectly still, fingers gripping Steve’s arm.   
  
Behind the shield, Steve heard grunting and punching, and the kind of scream he associated with someone losing their favorite tesitcle.  He hefted the kid and swiveled for a look.  Just beyond the fence, T’Challa stood up, alone, glaring down at something Steve couldn’t see in the field.  Then, T’Challa kicked up a staff weapon, cracked it over his knee, and tossed the pieces away.     
  
Pacify.  Right.     
  
T’Challa threw Steve a nod and leapt the fence.   
  
Steve tapped his ear, but the  _ Daybreak _ ’s channel remained silent as deep space.  Where the hell was Natasha?   
  
“ViSN, report.  Nat, come in.”     
  
The quiet channel stuttered suddenly, a wooly crackle chased off by an ear-numbing whine.   
  
Steve looked at the child in his arms, who was distracted by his reflection in the back of the shield.  “Alright kid, we’re gonna get you out of-”   
  
An explosion shattered something big in the center of the village.  Steve turned to see the market building collapsing, shrieking to the ground like a dying movie dinosaur.     
  
“Clint!”   
  
He shifted the kid to his back and ran.     
  
From the rolling plume of debris that’d been the market, he could hear militants shouting in their clipped language.  The kid stiffened on Steve’s back.  His small hand shot out, pointing at something in the rubble.   
  
Energy blasts cut wildly through the haze, trailing after the tumbling shape of Clint as he tried to run.  He was wounded, dark ribbons of blood streaming across one eye, left arm pulled tight to his side.   
  
“Hold on,” Steve said to the kid over his shoulder, and released the shield’s mag lock.  “Heads up, Clint!”   
  
But before he could throw it, the edge of his shield came to an abrupt stop in a black gloved hand, sharp claws extended.   
  
“There isn’t time!”  T’Challa shouted, then spun Steve bodily to face a second group of attackers.  Two reptile and two bird men charged at them from the west end of the village.   
  
Steve managed to mutter, “Crap,” before raising his shield again.  The kid on his back shrank down as green blasts sizzled across the distance, clipped the top rim of the shield, and tore over Steve’s shoulder.  Behind him, T’Challa grunted like he’d been hit, and the acrid char of chemical smoke drifted over Steve’s shoulder.   
  
“Your-”   
  
“I’m fine,” grumbled T’Challa.  The four hostiles couldn’t fan out in the narrow alley.  T’Challa crowded Steve’s back, sandwiching the kid tight between them, and aimed his blades from either side of the shield.  “Don’t move.”   
  
Lilac light shot down the alley and took down the bookend hostiles.  Their comrades reevaluated the situation. . .and then leapt up the walls to the rooftops.     
  
“I didn’t know they could do that,” Steve murmured.  T’Challa sprang to the left, bounded up the alley wall, and went to engage the bird man on his higher ground.  Steve swallowed, zeroing in on the smaller guy stalking down the grassy roofs to the right.  To the kid sagging low across his back, he said, “I bet you knew they could do that.”   
  
Then the fragile, clinging weight was gone.  And Steve couldn’t turn to look for him because a shadow flew down on top of him.   
  
They smashed to the ground in a breath-stealing heap.  Steve’s shield arm was trapped against his chest by the weight of the other man as their momentum had them rolling backward.  But it also meant when Steve came up he was on top.  He threw a left jab, but the squirming reptile man zigged his head aside and landed a punch of his own, right across Steve’s nose.   
  
Steve spat, pressed his weight down on the shield until the man’s black eyes bulged, and didn’t get a chance to throw a second punch.   
  
He was thrown aside by a second, much heavier body; The bird man T’Challa had been after.   
  
Rolling again, tossed by arms not entirely weaker than his own, Steve banged his head against the rim of the shield and then the alley wall where he finally came to a stop.  He coughed, “Goddamn it,” and black flowers bloomed behind his eyes.   
  
“I have the child, and your friend,” T’Challa said over the comm.   
  
The bird man was on his feet--so damn quick--scrabbling toward Steve with talons outstretched.  Steve tried to shake the cobwebs off.  “That’s. . .super.”    
  
Bird man hoisted Steve to his knees with a length of fabric wrapped tight around his throat. Before he could swing his shield up, knock the asshole right in his weird pinched mouth, the smaller man jumped on Steve’s shield arm.    
  
Trapped between them, running out of air and the esophagus to breath it, Steve lunged backward until bird man hit opposite wall.  The littler guy held onto Steve’s shield like a drowning man.   
  
The blood in Steve’s head began to feel like boiling acid.  With his left hand, he paid back the smaller guy by punching him square in his smooth nose bump.  The reptile man howled, his grip on the shield faltered, and Steve, losing vision and precious brain cells by the second, pressed back hard enough against bird man to give his legs room.  He kicked the smaller hostile to the other side of the alley, where he rebounded off the wall with a satisfying whack.  Clutching what were probably several broken ribs, the little guy didn’t get up again.   
  
Focused on bird man once more, Steve raged up and back with his shield.  The vibranium hit adobe, but not flesh.  As he tried it again, a dismayed voice came over the comm.   
  
“Oh no,” Wanda moaned.   
  
Steve couldn’t tell if the meaty, rushing sound in his ears was his oxygen-deprived heartbeat or the wind.   
  
“What?”  He gurgled out, swatting at bird man again.  This time it connected, bird man hissed in pain, and the fabric lost its death-grip on Steve’s neck.  He dropped the shield to wedge all his fingers in the fabric.  “Wanda, say again!  Nat, come in!”   
  
While bird man’s long arms thrashed with Steve’s, still trying to make his original plan work, Steve heard a spacecraft engine booming over the village.  Looking up, he watched a sleek shape soar overhead and come about near the homestead where they’d found the kid.   
  
Over the comm, T’Challa said darkly, “That is the  _ Havok _ ’s shuttle.”   
  
Better goddamn not be.   
  
“Fu-” Steve started to say, but bird man’s tightening grip cut him off.  Using his attacker’s arm for leverage, Steve curled his body upward then launched himself forward, throwing bird man over his shoulder.  He hit the wall and landed in a wriggling pile with his friend.  Steve reared back and kicked him across the temple.   
  
Bent double, hands shaking, Steve tore the fabric from his neck.  Breathing felt like choking all over again, only with razor blades for added spice.  Eyeing the now-limp hostiles, he scooped up his shield and headed for the shuttle’s landing site.   
  
At the edge of the field, he found T’Challa already waiting, and watching.  The shuttle came down fast.  It was like finding the damn thing all over again, all the panic and misery torn free again, matching Steve’s throat for rawness.   
  
Before the shuttle’s thrusters completed touchdown, twenty feet from the ground, the hatch opened.  A dark figure launched himself out, landed in a crouching roll, and burst from the roiling cloud of exhaust at a full run.   
  
Steve swallowed, hurt spiking down his throat.  “Bucky.”   
  
“He shouldn’t be here,” T’Challa muttered.   
  
There being no way to agree without making it worse, Steve simply said, “Neither should we.”


End file.
